Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh (1943- ), award-winning British theatre and film writer/director. Leigh, a doctor’s son, was born in Salford, near Manchester, and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), which he abandoned for Camberwell School of Art and the London Film School. In 1967 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and, four years later, after a further period producing for the stage in Birmingham, he converted a play, Bleak Moments (1971), into his first film. Since then, and excluding his work in theatre, he has, with no noticeable compromises to commercial expediency, directed more than 20 works for television and cinema, as well as a trailer for the London Film Festival.

A sardonic observer of British inequality, Leigh is noted for his television plays and films, which are meticulously detailed and cynical constructions of the lives of the uneducated, the poor, and the underclasses. A work such as Naked (1993) displays a disgust with contemporary England that, in British cinema, only Lindsay Anderson has matched. His contempt, however, is saved for the bourgeoisie, whom, as in High Hopes (1988), he caricatures as uncomprehending, snobbish, and sexually arrested. The team of actors who develop his dramas operate somewhere between direction and improvisation, often locking their faces into grotesque “expressionist” grimaces. They rarely develop as characters—rather, they follow their own internal logic towards sometimes farcical conclusions, out of which, as in the Cannes Festival Palme d’Or winner Secrets and Lies (1996), truth, understanding, and reconciliation between people can emerge.

Leigh’s series for television of five-minute miniature dramas (which includes the celebrated The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 Cup Final, 1975), as well as Nuts in May (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977), Who’s Who (1978), Grown Ups (1981), Home Sweet Home (1983), Meantime (1983), and Four Days in July (1984), and films such as High Hopes (1988), Life is Sweet (1990), and Naked (1993), helped to establish his reputation, especially outside Britain, as a contemporary observer of British manners. If his work, with its suggestion of the grotesque, sits uncomfortably within British cinema, films such as Secrets and Lies (1996), Career Girls (1997), Topsy-Turvy (1999), All or Nothing (2002), and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), with their sudden twists and transformations of character and mood, extend its range and confirm Leigh as one of the major talents of British cinema. His period piece Vera Drake (2004) told the story of a backstreet abortionist in 1950s London; it brought its director an Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA award, both in the Best Director category, and won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival. Leigh returned to playwrighting in 2005 for the first time in over a decade with Two Thousand Years, a work commissioned by the National Theatre. His other stage plays include Babies Grow Old (1974), Ecstasy (1979), Goose-Pimples (1981), Smelling a Rat (1988), Greek Tragedy (1989), and It's a Great Big Shame! (1993). He was made an OBE in 1993.