Lester, Richard

Lester, Richard (1932- ), American-born British film director. He was born in Philadelphia and by the age of 19 had graduated in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. After gaining experience as a director at a local CBS television station, he settled in Britain in the mid-1950s at the onset of commercial television. He made The Dick Lester Show (1956), a comedy schedule-filler that lasted only one episode but which was seen by Peter Sellers. Sellers subsequently enlisted Lester to direct Idiot Weekly (1956), a television spin-off of The Goon Show. This led to further shows with Sellers and Spike Milligan, and a slapstick short The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film (1959) that was nominated for an Academy Award.

In the early 1960s Lester started to make commercials and directed the jazz film, It’s Trad, Dad (1962), shooting some of the first footage of Chubby Checker performing the twist. After this, he enjoyed a string of commercial successes: A Hard Day's Night (1964), an exuberant and anarchic day-in-the-life of The Beatles, shot at the height of their fame; The Knack (1965), a light-hearted take on the newfound sexual freedoms of the 1960s that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes; Help! (1965), a knockabout Beatles follow-up; and the farce A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum (1966).

Lester then made How I Won the War (1967), an absurdist anti-war satire starring John Lennon, which used Brechtian techniques to distance itself from its audience; Petulia (1968), a fractured dissection of American sexual mores, which was taken by critics as an attack on his native country; and The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), an apocalyptic vision based on a play by Spike Milligan, whose bizarre humour passed most people by. After these films Lester’s career suffered a four-year hiatus, until he returned with the big-budget adventure The Three Musketeers (1973). For the rest of his career, apart from The Ritz (1976), a contemporary farce based on a play by Terrence McNally, Lester has stuck to period or science fantasy subjects, including The Four Musketeers (1974), Robin and Marian (1976), Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979), and Superman II (1980) and Superman III (1983). Steven Soderbergh published a tribute to Lester in the book Getting Away With It (2000).