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Mike Leigh

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Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh, April 2008
Born (1943-02-20) 20 February 1943 (age 81)
Brocket Hall, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, England [1]
SpouseAlison Steadman (1973-2001)

Michael "Mike" Leigh, OBE (born 20 February 1943) is an Academy Award nominated British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design.[2] He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between work for the theatre and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterized by a gritty "kitchen sink realism" style. His well-known films include Life is Sweet (1990), the comedy-drama Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy (1999), and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are arguably Naked (1993) for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes,[3] the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and Golden Lion winner Vera Drake (2004).

His films and stage plays, according to the critic Michael Coveney, " comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period." [4] Coveney further noted Leigh's role in helping to create stars - Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Anthony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked, - and remarked that the list of actors who have worked with him over the years, - including Sheila Kelley, Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, Eric Richard, Julie Walters - "comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent." [5] Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books in January 1994, noted: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other wholly original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."[6]

Leigh begins his projects without a script, but starts from a basic premise which is developed through improvisation by the actors. Leigh works initially one-to-one with each actor, developing a character who is based, in the first place, on someone he or she knows. "The world of the characters and their relationships is brought into existence by discussion and a great amount of improvisation - that is, improvising a character. And research into anything and everything that will fill out the authenticity of the character." It is only after months of rehearsal, or 'preparing for going out on location to make up a film', that Leigh writes a shooting script, a bare scenario. Then, on the shoot, on location, after further 'real rehearsing', the script is finalised. "I'll set up an improvisation ,.. I'll analyse and discuss it,.. we'll do another, and I'll ... refine and refine... until the actions and dialogue are totally integrated. Then we shoot it." [7]

Further aspects of Leigh to note; "He is a gifted cartoonist; he is a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s, and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television." [8]

Early life

Leigh, having been born in Welwyn, (his mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps), was brought up in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, the son of Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor.[9] Leigh's family was a Jewish immigrant one (whose surname was originally Lieberman, but this was anglicised in 1939, 'for obvious reasons.') [10][11][12][13] The war having come to an end Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." [14] Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film Bleak Moments in 1971. There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master called Mr Nutter supplied the library with new plays the minute they were published.[15] Outside of school Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Habonim. He attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all round the country in the last years of the 1950s. Throughout this time, (and though supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte), the most important part of his artistic consumption was the cinema. In 1960, 'to his utter astonishment', he won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh went on to start honing his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress Alison Steadman.[16]

Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, found himself being taught how to 'laugh, cry and snog' for weekly rep purposes and so became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts ( in 1963), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and the London School of Film Technique in Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows, an 'improvised' film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed 'living, loving and bickering' on the streets of New York, and Leigh had "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors." [17] Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker - "Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the (Arts Theatre) production," - Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and the surreal writing of Flann O'Brien, whose 'tragi-comedy' Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw at this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear, and in 1965, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisations, the actors having based their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of George Grosz, Picasso, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. He played small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, (West 11,Two Left Feet), and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC TV series Maigret. In 1964/65 he teamed up with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.

Career

Between 1965 and 1970 Leigh's activity was varied. In 1965 he went to work at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham as a resident assistant director and had the opportunity to start experimenting with the idea that writing and rehearsing could potentially be part of the same process. The Box Play, a family scenario staged in a cage-like box, "absorbed all sorts of contemporary ideas in art such as the space frames of Roland Pichet..it was visually very exciting," , and two more 'improvised' pieces followed.[18] After the Birmingham interlude he found a flat in Euston, where he lived for the next ten years. In 1966/67 he worked as an assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, assisting Peter Hall on (a disastrous) Macbeth, and on Coriolanus , and Trevor Nunn on a knockabout The Taming of the Shrew. He also worked on an improvised play with some professional actors on a play of his own called NENAA, (an acronym for the North East New Arts Assiociation), which explored the fantasies of a Tynesider working in a café, with ideas of founding an arts association in the north-east. Leigh wrote, in 1970; " I saw that we must start off with a collection of totally unrelated characters (each one the specific creation of its actor) and then go through a process in which I must cause them to meet each other, and build a network of real relationships; the play would be drawn from the results." After Stratford-upon-Avon Leigh directed a couple of London drama school productions that included Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore at E15 Acting School in Loughton - where he met Alison Steadman for the first time. In 1968, wanting to return to Manchester, he sub-let his London flat and moved to Levenshulme. Taking up a part-time lectureship in a Catholic women teachers training college, Sedgley Park, he ran a drama course and devised and directed Epilogue, focusing on a priest with doubts, and for the Manchester Youth Theatre he devised and directed two big-cast projects, Big Basil and Glum Victoria and the Lad with Specs. As the decade came to a close Leigh knew he wanted to make films, and that - "The manner of working was at last fixed. There would be discussions and rehearsals. Plays or films would develop organically with actors fully liberated into the creative process. After an exploratory improvisation period, Leigh would write a structure, indicating the order in which scenes happened, usually with a single bare sentence:Johnny and Sophie meet; Betty does Joy's hair; [etc..]And it was rehearsed and rehearsed until it achieved the required quality of 'finish'." [19]

In the 1970s, Leigh made nine television plays. Earlier plays such as Nuts in May and Abigail's Party tended more towards bleakly yet humorously satirising middle-class manners and attitudes. His plays are generally more caustic, stridently trying to show the banality of society.[citation needed] Goose-Pimples and Abigail's Party both focus on the vulgar middle class in a convivial party setting that spirals out of control. The television version of Abigail's Party was made at some speed, Steadman was pregnant at the time, and Leigh's objections to flaws in the production, particularly the lighting, led to his preference for theatrical films.

There was something of a hiatus in Leigh's career following the death of his father at the end of February 1985. Leigh was in Australia at the time - having agreed to attend a screenwriters conference in Melbourne at the start of 1985, he had then accepted an invitation to teach at the Australian Film School in Sydney - and he then 'buried his solitude and sense of loss in a busy round of people, publicity and talks.' He gradually extended 'the long journey home' and went on to visit Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, China. He said later, " The whole thing was an amazing, unforgettable period in my life. But it was all to do with personal feelings, my father, where to go next, and my desire to make a feature film. I felt I was at at the end of one stage of my career and at the start of another." His 1986 project codenamed 'Rhubarb' , for which he had gathered actors in Blackburn, including Jane Horrocks, Julie Walters and David Thewlis, was cancelled after seven weeks rehearsals and Leigh returned home. "The nature of what I do is totally creative, and you have to get in there and stick with it. The tension between the bourgeois suburban and the anarchist bohemian that is in my work is obviously in my life, too...I started to pull myself together. I didn't work, I simply stayed at home and looked ater the boys." In 1987 Channel 4 put up some money for a short film and, with Portman Productions, agreed to co-produce Leigh's first feature film since Bleak Moments.[20]

In 1988 then, he made High Hopes, about a disjointed working-class family whose members live in a run-down flat and a council house. Leigh's subsequent films such as Naked and Vera Drake are somewhat starker, more brutal, and concentrate more on the working-class; another of his recent films, however, is a modern-day comedy, Happy-Go-Lucky. A commitment to social realism and humanism is evident throughout. More specifically, several of his films and television plays examine the domestic relationships of ordinary people, which are brought to a head or transformed by some crisis towards the end of the film.

His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy, and Abigail's Party.

The anger inherent in Leigh's material, in some ways typical of the Thatcher years, softened after her departure from the political scene. In 2005, Leigh returned to directing for the stage after many years absence with his new play, Two Thousand Years at the Royal National Theatre in London. The play deals with the divisions within a left-wing secular Jewish family when one of the younger members finds religion. It is the first time Leigh has drawn on his Jewish background for inspiration.

Leigh has won several prizes at major European film festivals. Most notably he won the Best Director award at Cannes for Naked in 1993 and the Palme d'Or in 1996 for Secrets & Lies. He won the Leone d'Oro for the best film at the International Venice Film Festival in 2004 with Vera Drake. He has been nominated for the Academy Award seven times, twice each for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake (Best Original Screenplay and Best Directing) and once for Topsy-Turvy, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Another Year (Best Original Screenplay only). He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.[21]

Leigh has used a pool of actors regularly over the years, including Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Marion Bailey, Phil Davis, Jim Broadbent, David Thewlis, Peter Wight, Imelda Staunton, Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Claire Skinner, and the late Katrin Cartlidge.

Style

Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed. Initial preparation is in private with the director and then the actors are introduced to each other in the order that their characters would have met in their lives. Intimate moments are explored that will not even be referred to in the final film to build insight and understanding of history, character and inner motivation. When an improvisation needs to be stopped, he says to the actors: 'Come out of character,' before they discuss what's happened or what might have happened in a situation.[22]

The critical scenes in the eventual story are performed and recorded in full-costumed, real-time improvisations where the actors encounter for the first time new characters, events or information which may dramatically affect their characters' lives. Final filming is more traditional as definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. The director reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film.

In an interview with Laura Miller, "Listening to the World: An Interview With Mike Leigh", published on salon.com, Leigh states, "I make very stylistic films indeed, but style doesn't become a substitute for truth and reality. It's an integral, organic part of the whole thing." Leigh's vision is to depict ordinary life, "real life", unfolding under extenuating circumstances.[clarification needed] He makes courageous decisions to document reality. He speaks about the criticism Naked received: "The criticism comes from the kind of quarters where "political correctness" in its worst manifestation is rife. It's this kind of naive notion of how we should be in an unrealistic and altogether unhealthily over-wholesome way."[23]

Leigh's characters often struggle, "to express inexpressible feelings.Words are important, but rarely enough. The art of evasion and failure in communication certainly comes from Pinter, whom Leigh acknowledges as an important influence. He especially admires Pinter's earliest work, and directed The Caretaker while still at RADA." [24]

Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by 'a detached, medical watchfulness', Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Michael Coveney: " The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors, and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime, and Naked. And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlies (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work, and the pub scene in Life is Sweet..." [25]

Leigh's style has been influential over a number of film companies. ACT 2 CAM uses his improvisation techniques to build characters and context for films with young people in the UK. His character work, improvisations and unplanned scenes are a technique heavily influenced by East 15 School of Acting, where these methods continue to be taught and used at the forefront of the acting and directing training industry.

Personal life

In September 1973 he married Alison Steadman; they have two sons: Toby (born February 1978)[26] and Leo (born August 1981). Steadman appeared in seven of his films and several of his plays, including Wholesome Glory and Abigail's Party. They divorced in 2001.[27] He now lives in Camden with costume designer Charlotte Holdich.

Filmography

List of plays

Recurring collaborators

Actor Bleak Moments
(1971)		 Hard Labour
(1973)		 Nuts in May
(1976)		 Abigail's Party
(1977)		 Kiss of Death
(1977)		 Who's Who
(1978)		 Grown-Ups
(1980)		 Home Sweet Home
(1982)		 Meantime
(1983)		 Four Days in July
(1985)		 High Hopes
(1988)		 Life is Sweet
(1990)		 Naked
(1993)		 Secrets & Lies
(1996)		 Career Girls
(1997)		 Topsy-Turvy
(1999)		 All or Nothing
(2002)		 Vera Drake
(2004)		 Happy-Go-Lucky
(2008)		 Another Year
(2010)
Emma Amos ☒N ☒N
Marion Bailey ☒N ☒N ☒N
Linda Beckett ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Elizabeth Berrington ☒N ☒N ☒N
Brenda Blethyn ☒N ☒N
Brid Brennan ☒N ☒N
Jim Broadbent ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Katrin Cartlidge ☒N ☒N ☒N
Simon Chandler ☒N ☒N
Ron Cook ☒N ☒N
Allan Corduner ☒N ☒N
Phil Davis ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Edna Doré ☒N ☒N
Karina Fernandez ☒N ☒N
Sally Hawkins ☒N ☒N ☒N
Marianne Jean-Baptiste ☒N ☒N(composer)
Alex Kelly ☒N ☒N
Sam Kelly ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Clifford Kershaw ☒N ☒N
Lesley Manville ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Eddie Marsan ☒N ☒N
Daniel Mays ☒N ☒N
Gary McDonald ☒N ☒N
Stephen Rea ☒N ☒N
Martin Savage ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Andy Serkis ☒N ☒N
Lesley Sharp ☒N ☒N
Ruth Sheen ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Claire Skinner ☒N ☒N
Liz Smith ☒N ☒N ☒N
Timothy Spall ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
Imelda Staunton ☒N ☒N
Alison Steadman ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N
David Thewlis ☒N ☒N
Peter Wight ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N ☒N

Further reading

  • Carney, Ray & Quart, Leonard, The Films of Mike Leigh - Embracing the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  • Clements, Paul, The Improvised Play (London: Methuen, 1983) ISBN 0413504409 (pbk.)
  • Coveney, Michael, The World According to Mike Leigh (London: HarperCollins, 1996)
  • Movshovitz, Howie (ed.) Mike Leigh Interviews (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000)
  • Whitehead, Tony, Mike Leigh (British Film Makers) (Manchester University Press, 2007)

References

  1. ^ Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, p.36
  2. ^ Coveney, p.66
  3. ^ "Festival de Cannes: Naked". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2009-08-22.
  4. ^ The world according to Mike Leigh, p.8, Michael Coveney, Harper Collins 1996
  5. ^ Coveney, World according to Mike Leigh, p.9
  6. ^ Buruma, quoted in Coveney, the world according to Mike leigh, p.14
  7. ^ Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, p.30 Faber 2008
  8. ^ Coveney, p.7
  9. ^ Filmreference.com
  10. ^ Rollingstone.com
  11. ^ Jewishjournal.com
  12. ^ Thejc.com
  13. ^ Mike Leigh comes out on his Jewishness by Linda Grant
  14. ^ Coveney, p.41
  15. ^ Coveney, p.7, 45
  16. ^ Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, p.17
  17. ^ Coveney, p.60
  18. ^ Coveney, p.72
  19. ^ Coveney, p.80
  20. ^ Coveney, p.183-184
  21. ^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 9 August 2010.
  22. ^ Coveney, p.16
  23. ^ Salon: Mike Leigh, page 2
  24. ^ Coveney, p.6
  25. ^ Coveney p.12
  26. ^ Coveney, p.18
  27. ^ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alison-steadman-enter-alison-the-director-578076.html


Awards and achievements
Cannes Film Festival
Preceded by Best Director
Mike Leigh
1993
for Naked 		Succeeded by
Cannes Film Festival
Preceded by Palme d'Or
Mike Leigh
1996
for Secrets & Lies 		Succeeded by
Venice International Film Festival
Preceded by Golden Lion
Mike Leigh
2004
for Vera Drake 		Succeeded by
British Academy of Film and Television Arts
Preceded by Best Direction
Mike Leigh
2004
for Vera Drake 		Succeeded by

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