The oldest known surviving film was shot in the United Kingdom as well as early colour films. While film production reached an all-time high in 1936, the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during which the directors David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed produced their most critically acclaimed works. Many British actors have accrued critical success and worldwide recognition, such as Audrey Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Glynis Johns, Maggie Smith, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Ian Mckellen, Joan Collins, Judi Dench, Julie Andrews, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Kate Winslet. Some of the films with the largest ever box office returns have been made in the United Kingdom, including the fourth and fifth highest-grossing film franchises.
Four Feather Falls is a British television programme, the third puppet TV show produced by Gerry Anderson for Granada Television. It was based on an idea by Barry Gray, who also wrote the show's music. The series was the first to use an early version of Anderson's Supermarionation puppetry. Thirty-nine 13-minute episodes were produced, broadcast by Granada from February until November 1960.
Nicolas Jack Roeg was an English film director and cinematographer, best known for directing Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980) and The Witches (1990).
Johnny Speight was an English television scriptwriter of many classic British sitcoms.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a British television adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same name by George Orwell, originally broadcast on BBC Television in December 1954. The production proved to be hugely controversial, with questions asked in Parliament and many viewer complaints over its supposed subversive nature and horrific content. It starred Peter Cushing, Yvonne Mitchell, Donald Pleasence and André Morell.
The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 for six seasons from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually original works written for television, although dramatic adaptations of fiction also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.
Oh... Rosalinda!! is a 1955 British musical comedy film by the British director-writer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film stars Michael Redgrave, Mel Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Ludmilla Tchérina and Anton Walbrook and features Anneliese Rothenberger and Dennis Price.
Jack Isaac Clayton was a British film director and producer who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is a 1968 British comedy film produced and directed by Clive Donner and starring Barry Evans, Judy Geeson and Angela Scoular. The screenlay is by Hunter Davies based on his 1965 novel of the same name.
Just a Boys' Game is a 1979 Play for Today written by Peter McDougall and directed by John Mackenzie.
Loving Memory is a 1970 black and white psychological drama film written and directed by Tony Scott, credited as Anthony Scott. This 52 minute film was made 12 years before Scott's feature directorial debut, The Hunger. It was partly financed by the actor Albert Finney and the BFI Production Board, and was shown at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
The Big Swallow is a 1901 British silent comic trick film, directed by James Williamson, featuring a man, irritated by the presence of a photographer, who solves his dilemma by swallowing him and his camera whole. The three-shot trick film is, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "one of the most important early British films in that it was one of the first to deliberately exploit the contrast between the eye of the camera and of the audience watching the final film".
The Biter Bit is an 1899 British short black-and-white silent comedy film, produced by Bamforth & Co Ltd, featuring a boy playing a practical joke on a gardener by grasping his hose to stop the water flow and then letting go when the gardener looks down it to check. The film "is an English remake" of Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895), according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "providing a good illustration of how early film production companies cheerfully plagiarised each other's work" with "a few minor differences between, most notably a rather greater sense of space and depth in the Bamforth version" and "three distinct planes to the action". It is included in the BFI DVD Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers and a clip is used in Paul Merton's interactive guide to early British silent comedy How They Laughed on the BFI website.
Lloyd Reckord was a Jamaican actor, film maker, and stage director who lived in England for some years. Reckord appeared in 1958 in a West End production of Hot Summer Night, which as an ITV adaptation broadcast on 1 February 1959 contained the earliest known example of an interracial kiss on television. His brother was the dramatist Barry Reckord.
Pressure is a 1976 British drama film directed by Horace Ové and starring Herbert Norville, Oscar James and Frank Singuineau. Co-written by Ové with Samuel Selvon, it is hailed as the UK's first Black dramatic feature-length film, and has been characterised as "a gritty and dynamic study of a generation in crisis". Ové said in a 2005 interview: "What Pressure tried to do was to portray the experience of the Windrush generation, the kids who came with them and the kids born here."
Edward J. Danziger (1909–1999) and Harry Lee Danziger (1913–2005) were American-born brothers who produced many British films and TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s.
Rock You Sinners is a 1957 British second feature black and white musical film featuring early British rock and roll, including Art Baxter and His Rock 'n' Roll Sinners, best known for their song Rock You Sinners. It is generally regarded as the first British rock and roll movie.
The BFI Production Board (1964-2000) was a state-funded film production fund managed by the British Film Institute (BFI) and "explicitly charged with backing work by new and uncommercial filmmakers." Emerging from the Experimental Film Fund, the BFI Production Board was a major source of funding for experimental, art house, animation, short and documentary cinema, with a continuing commitment to funding under-represented voices in filmmaking.
The Human Jungle is a British TV series about a psychiatrist, made for ABC Weekend TV by Independent Artists.
The Bike Ride, Bike Round or Boy on the Bike is a 1973 advert for the bread maker Hovis. It was directed by Ridley Scott.
