Leigh studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique.[3] His short-lived acting career included the role of a mute in the 1963 Maigret episode "The Flemish Shop". He began working as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s. Leigh is known for his lengthy rehearsal and improvisation techniques with actors to build characters and narrative for his films. His purpose is to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films".[4]
Leigh was born on 20 February 1943 to Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor.[10][11] Leigh was born at Brocket Hall in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire,[12] at the time a maternity home. 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. Leigh was brought up in the Broughton area of Salford, Lancashire. He attended North Grecian Street Junior School.[13] He is from a Jewish family; his paternal grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. The family name, originally Lieberman, was anglicised in 1939 "for obvious reasons".[14][15][16][17] When the war ended, 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."[18] Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971). There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.[19]
Outside school, Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Labour Zionist youth movement Habonim. In the late 1950s, he attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all round the country. During this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte. His father strongly opposed the idea that Leigh might become an artist or an actor. He forbade him his frequent habit of sketching visitors who came to the house and regarded him as a problem child because of his creative interests.[20] In 1960, "to his utter astonishment", Leigh won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School, where he met the actress Alison Steadman.[21]
Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, finding himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes, and became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (in 1963), the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique on Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows (1959), 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 "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors".[22] 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 Flann O'Brien, whose "tragi-comedy" Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw in this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear and in 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisation, the actors basing their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Picasso, Ronald Searle,[23]George Grosz, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. Leigh had 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 Television series Maigret. In 1964–65, he collaborated with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.[24]
Leigh has been called "a gifted cartoonist ... 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."[25][26]
Career
1965–1979: Plays and television films
In 1965, Leigh went to work at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham as a resident assistant director and started to experiment with the idea that writing and rehearsing could be part of the same process. The Box Play, a family scenario staged in a cagelike 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.[27]
After the Birmingham interlude, Leigh 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 on productions of Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Taming of the Shrew. He worked on an improvised play of his own with some professional actors called NENAA (an acronym for "North East New Arts Association"), which explored the fantasies of a Tynesider working in a café, with ideas of founding an arts association in the northeast.[28]
In 1970, Leigh wrote, "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 sublet 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.[28]
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'."[29]
In the 1970s, Leigh made nine television plays. Earlier plays such as Nuts in May (1976) and Abigail's Party (1977) tended more toward bleak yet humorous satire of middle-class manners and attitudes. His plays are generally more caustic, stridently trying to depict society's banality.[28]Goose-Pimples and Abigail's Party 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.[28]
There was something of a hiatus in Leigh's career after his father died in 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", visiting Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. He has said, "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 the end of one stage of my career and at the start of another."[28]
Leigh's 1986 project code-named "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 after 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.[33]
In 1988, Leigh and producer Simon Channing Williams founded Thin Man Films, a film production company based in London, to produce Leigh's films.[34] They chose the company name because neither of them was thin. Later in 1988, Leigh made High Hopes, about a disjointed working-class family whose members live in a rundown flat and a council house. His later films, such as Naked and Vera Drake, are somewhat starker and more brutal, and concentrate more on the working class. His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy, and Abigail's Party.[35]
In the 1990s, Leigh enjoyed critical successes, including such films as the comedy Life Is Sweet (1990) starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Claire Skinner, and Jane Horrocks. It was his third feature film, and follows a working-class North London family over a few summer weeks. Film critic Philip French in The Observer defended the film against criticism that it was patronising: "Leigh has been called patronising. The charge is false. The Noël Coward/David Lean film This Happy Breed, evoked by Leigh in several panning shots across suburban back gardens, is patronising. Coward and Lean pat their characters on the back...Leigh shakes them, hugs them, sometimes despairs over them, but never thinks that they are other than versions of ourselves."[36]Independent Spirit Awards nominated Life Is Sweet for Best International Film.
In 1996, Leigh directed his fifth feature film, the drama Secrets & Lies (1996). Its ensemble cast included Leigh regulars Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Phyllis Logan, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The film premiered at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Palme d'Or and the Best Actress award for Blethyn. It was a financial and critical success. Film critic Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Secrets & Lies four out of four stars, writing, "moment after moment, scene after scene, Secrets & Lies unfolds with the fascination of eavesdropping". He called the film "a flowering of his technique. It moves us on a human level, it keeps us guessing during scenes as unpredictable as life, and it shows us how ordinary people have a chance of somehow coping with their problems, which are rather ordinary, too."[38] In 2009, Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list.[39] It received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
He followed that success with Career Girls (1997) and Topsy-Turvy (1999), a period drama about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. 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 with a new play, Two Thousand Years, at the Royal National Theatre. The play deals with divisions within a left-wing secular Jewish family when one of the younger members finds religion. It was the first time Leigh had drawn on his Jewish background for material.[28] In 2002, Leigh directed the working-class drama All or Nothing. The same year, he became chairman for his alma mater, London Film School. He remained chair until March 2018, when he was succeeded by Greg Dyke.[40]
In 2010, Leigh released his film Another Year, starring Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, and Lesley Manville. It premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or.[43] The film was shown at the 54th London Film Festival before its general British release date on 5 November 2010.[44] The film was also a success in the U.S., with Ebert giving the film his highest rating, four out of four stars, and writing, "Not quite every year brings a new Mike Leigh film, but the years that do are blessed with his sympathy, penetrating observation, and instinct for human comedy...Leigh's 'Another Year' is like a long, purifying soak in empathy."[45] At the 83rd Academy Awards, Leigh was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, losing to The King's Speech.[46][47]
In February 2020, it was reported that Leigh would begin shooting his latest film in the summer.[54] After a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was announced that the film, Hard Truths, would go into production in 2023.[55] Set in contemporary times, it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin.[56] In 2024, Leigh said he was struggling to secure funding for his next project.[57]
Style
Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over several weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions to the cast, who gradually discover their fates and act out their responses. Initial preparation is in private with Leigh, 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 personal motivation. When an improvisation needs to be stopped, he tells the actors, "Come out of character", before they discuss what happened or might have happened in a situation.[58] According to critic Michael Coveney, Leigh's films and stage plays "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period."[59]
Final filming is more traditional as a definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. Leigh reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film. "The world of the characters and their relationships is brought into existence by discussion and a great amount of improvisation ... And research into anything and everything that will fill out the authenticity of the character." After months of rehearsal, or "preparing for going out on location to make up a film", Leigh writes a shooting script, a bare scenario. Then, on location, after further "real rehearsing", the script is finalized: "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."[60]
In an interview with Laura Miller, Leigh said, "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." He strives to depict ordinary life, "real life", unfolding under extenuating circumstances.[61] He has said, "I'm not an intellectual filmmaker. These are emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films. And there's a feeling of despair...I think there's a feeling of chaos and disorder."[4] Of the criticism Naked received, Leigh said: "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."[62]
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."[63]
Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. In a 1991 interview, he also cited Frank Capra, Fritz Lang, Yasujirō Ozu and even Jean-Luc Godard, "until the late '60s."[67] When pressed for British influences in that interview, he referred to the Ealing comedies, "despite their unconsciously patronizing way of portraying working-class people" and the early '60s British New Wave films. Asked for his favourite comedies, he replied, One, Two, Three; La règle du jeu; and "any Keaton".[67] 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 Ozu's. Michael Coveney wrote: "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".[68]
Favourite films
In 2012, Leigh participated in that year's Sight & Sound film polls. Held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, contemporary directors were asked to select ten films.[69] Leigh named the following ten:
In September 1973, Leigh married actress Alison Steadman. They have two sons. Steadman appeared in seven of his films and several of his plays, including Wholesome Glory and Abigail's Party. They divorced in 2001.[71] Leigh then lived in central London with the actress Marion Bailey.[72][73]
Political activism
Leigh is an atheist and a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK.[74] He is also a republican (anti-monarchist).[75] In 2014, Leigh publicly backed "Hacked Off" and its campaign for UK press self-regulation by "safeguarding the press from political interference while also giving vital protection to the vulnerable."[76][77][78]
In November 2019, along with other public figures, Leigh signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calling him "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsing him in the 2019 UK general election.[79] In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, Leigh signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election. The letter stated: "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."[80][81]
Leigh has been nominated at the Academy Awards seven times: twice each for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake (Best Original Screenplay and Best Director) and once for Topsy-Turvy, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Another Year (Best Original Screenplay only). Leigh has also 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.[82]
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1993 Birthday Honours, for services to the film industry.[2]
Katrin Juliet Cartlidge was an English actress. She first appeared on screen as Lucy Collins in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside (1982–1983), before going on to win the 1997 Evening Standard Film Award for Best Actress for the Mike Leigh film Career Girls. Her other film appearances included Leigh's Naked (1993), Before the Rain (1994), Breaking the Waves (1996) and From Hell (2001).
Abigail's Party is a play for stage and television, devised and directed in 1977 by Mike Leigh. It is a suburban situation comedy of manners, and a satire on the aspirations and tastes of the new middle class that emerged in Britain in the 1970s. The play developed in lengthy improvisations during which Mike Leigh explored the characters with the actors, but did not always reveal the incidents that would occur during the play. The production opened in April 1977 at the Hampstead Theatre, and returned after its initial run in the summer of 1977, for 104 performances in all. A recording was arranged at the BBC as a Play for Today, produced by Margaret Matheson for BBC Scotland and transmitted in November 1977.
Secrets & Lies is a 1996 drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh. Led by an ensemble cast consisting of many Leigh regulars, it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a well-educated black middle-class London optometrist, who was adopted as a baby and has chosen to trace her family history – and discovers that her birth mother, Cynthia, played by Brenda Blethyn, is a working-class white woman with a dysfunctional family. Claire Rushbrook co-stars as Cynthia's other daughter Roxanne, while Timothy Spall and Phyllis Logan portray Cynthia's brother and sister-in-law, who have secrets of their own affecting their everyday family life.
David Wheeler, better known as David Thewlis, is an English actor and filmmaker. He is known as a character actor and has appeared in a wide variety of genres in both film and television. He has received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and nominations for two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Topsy-Turvy is a 1999 British musical period drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh, starring Jim Broadbent as W. S. Gilbert and Allan Corduner as Sir Arthur Sullivan, along with Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville and Ron Cook. The story concerns the 15-month period in 1884 and 1885 leading up to the premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. The film focuses on the creative conflict between playwright and composer, and their decision to continue their partnership, which led to their creation of several more Savoy operas.
Vera Drake is a 2004 British period drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Daniel Mays and Eddie Marsan. It tells the story of a working-class woman in London in 1950 who performs illegal abortions. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and it was nominated for three Academy Awards and won three BAFTAs.
Life Is Sweet is a 1990 British comedy-drama film directed by Mike Leigh, starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks and Timothy Spall. Leigh's third cinematic film, it was his most commercially successful title at the time of release. A tragi-comic story, it follows the fortunes of a working-class North London family over a few weeks one summer.
Timothy Leonard Spall is an English actor. He gained recognition for his character actor roles on stage and screen. In 2000, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.
Naked is a 1993 British black comedy drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring David Thewlis as Johnny, a loquacious intellectual, philosopher and conspiracy theorist. The film won several awards, including best director and best actor at Cannes. Naked marked a new career high for Leigh as a director and made the then-unknown Thewlis an internationally recognised star.
High Hopes is a 1988 British comedy drama film directed by Mike Leigh, focusing on an extended working-class family living in King's Cross, London, and elsewhere.
Alison Steadman is an English actress. She received the 1977 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for Abigail's Party, the 1991 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for the Mike Leigh film Life Is Sweet and the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Actress for her role as Mari in the original production of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. In a 2007 Channel 4 poll, the '50 Greatest Actors' voted for by other actors, she was ranked 42.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a 1978 Italian film written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. The film depicts the life of Lombard peasant in a cascina (farmhouse) during the late 19th century. It shares similarities with the earlier Italian neorealist movement, focusing on the lives of the poor and casting actual farmers and locals instead of professional actors.
Gregory Jasper Cruttwell is an English filmmaker, former actor and the founder of football club, Balham F.C. He is the son of actress Geraldine McEwan and Hugh Cruttwell, former principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Happy-Go-Lucky is a 2008 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh. The screenplay focuses on a cheerful and optimistic primary school teacher and her relationships with those around her. The film was well received by critics and resulted in a number of awards for Mike Leigh's direction and screenplay, lead actress Sally Hawkins's performance, and Eddie Marsan's performance in a supporting role.
Another Year is a 2010 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, and Ruth Sheen. It follows a year in the life of an older couple who have been happily married for a long time, making them an anomaly among their friends and family members.
Bleak Moments is a 1971 British comedy-drama film by Mike Leigh in his directorial debut. Leigh's screenplay is based on a 1970 stage play at the Open Space Theatre, about the dysfunctional life of a young secretary.
"Hard Labour" is the 20th episode of third season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 12 March 1973. "Hard Labour" was written and directed by Mike Leigh, produced by Tony Garnett, and starred Liz Smith in her first major role.
Too Much of a Good Thing is a radio play, recorded entirely on location, as if it were a film, by Mike Leigh. Liane Aukin, the 'midwife' of the project, a BBC radio producer, knew Leigh through her brother David, the general manager at Hampstead Theatre. She had initially asked Leigh to revive Abigail's Party on the radio, but he preferred to supply an original piece. Ronald Mason, the head of radio drama, was enthusiastic and allocated £5000.
Mr. Turner is a 2014 biographical drama film based on the last 25 years of the life of artist J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). Written and directed by Mike Leigh, the film stars Timothy Spall in the title role, with Dorothy Atkinson, Paul Jesson, Marion Bailey, Lesley Manville, and Martin Savage.Describing Turner as "a great artist: a radical, revolutionary painter", writer/director Leigh explained, "I felt there was scope for a film examining the tension between this very mortal, flawed individual, and the epic work, the spiritual way he had of distilling the world".
Peterloo is a 2018 British historical drama, written and directed by Mike Leigh, based on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. The film was selected to be screened in the main competition section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival. The film received its UK premiere on 17 October 2018, as part of the BFI London Film Festival, at HOME in Manchester. The screening marked the first time that the festival had held a premiere outside London. Leigh said he was delighted that Peterloo would be premiered "where it happened".
↑ "Honorary Graduates". essex.ac.uk. 2002. Retrieved 29 January 2022. I want to congratulate you all on your degrees and thank the University for my honorary degree. Of course I would also very much like to congratulate the new graduands of East 15 Acting School, with which I do have a connection, because although as we thespian-type people know, it is an extraordinary anomaly to wear a ridiculous costume and to receive a degree for acting, nevertheless it is a wonderful thing, too. And I absolutely congratulate you and the University on having facilitated this phenomenon. Thank you very much."
Further reading
Carney, Raymond Francis, Junior and Quart, Leonard, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (Cambridge Film Classics, General Editor: Carney, Raymond Francis, Junior, Cambridge, New York, New York, Oakleigh, Melbourne, and Port Melbourne, Victoria, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapura, São Paulo, São Paulo, Delhi and New Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi, Dubai, Dubai, Tôkyô, and México, Distrito Federal: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Clements, Paul, The Improvised Play (London: Methuen, 1983) ISBN0-413-50440-9 (pbk.)
Coveney, Michael, The World According to Mike Leigh (paperback edition, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997, Originally Published: London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996), Includes a "Preface to the Paperback Edition", pp. xvii–xxiv.
Movshovitz, Howie (ed.) Mike Leigh Interviews (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000)
O'Sullivan, Sean, Mike Leigh (Contemporary Film Directors) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011)
Raphael, Amy (ed.), Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh (London: Faber & Faber, 2008)
Whitehead, Tony, Mike Leigh (British Film Makers) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)
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