Brian Cox on Lindsay Anderson
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actor Brian Cox chooses his one-time mentor and fellow Scot, Lindsay Anderson. "His effect is still on me to this day, and I can't throw him off. He taught me how to think. He triggered something off in me that nobody else had previously done."
A critic, an outsider, a provocateur, Anderson founded the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s with fellow documentary makers Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lorenza Mazzetti. His films include This Sporting Life and If… which won the Palm d’or in 1969 and helped launch the career of Malcolm MacDowell. Lindsay Anderson’s international reputation surpassed his fame in Britain, where his uncompromisingly anti-establishment stance failed to win him mainstream admirers, but he made several more provocative films and is remembered fondly by his friends and collaborators as an extremely funny, loyal and principled man.
Brian Cox, star of Rushmore, The Bourne Identity and Succession, is joined by Karl Magee from the Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling. Presented by Matthew Parris and produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Ellie Richold.
Future programmes in this series include journalist Donald McIntyre on the editor of Picture Post, Tom Hopkinson; Janet Ellis on the founder of the Puffin Club, Kaye Webb; and Terry Christian on Mr Manchester, Tony Wilson, along with author Paul Morley who wrote From Manchester With Love.
Transcript
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| 0:48.1 | From playing Titus Andronicus with the Royal Shakespeare Company to, more recently, media |
| 0:53.1 | magnate Logan Roy in the much-praised series Succession, our guest today has made his |
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| 1:06.1 | Brian Cox, welcome to Great Lives. |
| 1:08.4 | Thank you, Matthew. |
| 1:09.4 | You've chosen to champion a film director, but a director who isn't for want of a better |
| 1:15.2 | phrase, a household name, whom have you chosen, and why? |
| 1:19.4 | I've chosen the director, Lindsay Anderson, who had a profound effect on me as a young actor, |
| 1:27.9 | but also I think probably was the most principled man I ever met in my life, and his effect has |
| 1:34.8 | still with me to this day, and I can't throw him off. |
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