Anthony Harvey

Anthony Harvey (3 June 1930 – 23 November 2017) was an English filmmaker who began his career as a teenage actor, was a film editor in the 1950s and moved into directing in the mid-1960s. Harvey had fifteen film credits as an editor, and he directed thirteen films. The second film that Harvey directed, The Lion in Winter (1968), earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. Harvey's career is also notable for his recurring work with a number of leading actors and directors including Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Katharine Hepburn, Peter O'Toole, Richard Attenborough, Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston, Nick Nolte, the Boulting Brothers, Anthony Asquith, Bryan Forbes and Stanley Kubrick. He died in November 2017 at the age of 87. Biography Harvey was born in London in 1930. His father died when he was young and he was raised and took his name from his stepfather, actor and writer Morris Harvey. He began his screen career as an actor while a teenager and made his first film appearance playing Ptolemy, the younger brother of Cleopatra (played by Vivien Leigh, an acquaintance of his step-father) in the film version of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), where he recalled that he was "looked after" by star Claude Rains. Harvey gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but, although he worked for a time in repertory theatre, realised that he was not likely to be successful as an actor and decided to move into film-making. Career as film editor Harvey was taken on as an assistant editor by the Boulting Brothers (Roy Boulting and John Boulting). He soon found himself in high demand, and went on to edit a sequence of British films in the 1950s and early 1960s, developing fruitful working relationships with several major directors of the period including Anthony Asquith, Roy and John Boulting, Bryan Forbes, Martin Ritt, and UK-based American director Stanley Kubrick. Harvey's first film as editor was the Anthony Asquith short On Such A Night (1956), followed by his first feature assignment, the Ealing war comedy Private's Progress (also 1956), starring Richard Attenborough and Terry-Thomas. His subsequent work as an editor included Roy Boulting's comedies Brothers in Law (1957) and Happy Is the Bride (1958), the drama Tread Softly Stranger (1958) directed by Gordon Parry, the political comedy Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (aka The Man in the Cocked Hat, 1959), and I'm All Right Jack (also 1959).