Long-Distance Runner: A Memoir Book

Tony Richardson died on November 14, 1991. This book was discovered on the day of his death, hidden at the back of the same dark cupboard where he kept his Oscars. As his daughter Natasha movingly writes in her foreword, it is an "entertaining, humorous, and very personal account of the people and places he loved, the films he made, and the things that were important to him." Tony Richardson was born on June 5, 1928, in Shipley, Yorkshire. After Oxford University, he joined BBC Television and in 1955 set up the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre with George Devine. Richardson's time at the Royal Court, directing John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer and Luther, among many other productions, heralded a new departure for postwar theater. Through his films he brought this new theatrical realism to the screen. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, A Taste of Honey, and Tom Jones (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director) were among his most acclaimed movies from this period. Later films include The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Border, The Loved One, and The Hotel New Hampshire. In this candid memoir, Tony Richardson focuses on his passion for theater and film. He shares stories of working with Albert Finney, Peggy Ashcroft, Vivien Leigh, and Alan Bates in England - and Tab Hunter, Jack Nicholson, and Diana Ross, among many others, in America. We attend the rehearsals in which the young Laurence Olivier transformed himself into Archie Rice in The Entertainer, in Richardson's words "one of the single most thrilling moments in the theatre." And he describes directing an impossible Tallulah Bankhead in a spectacularly ill-fated production of Tennessee Williams's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Richardson writes beautifully of his quiet Yorkshire upbringing, surrounded by women he both loved and feared. He tells of his marriage to Vanessa Redgrave, the births of his daughters, his affair with Jeanne Mo