Jack Clayton

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Jack Isaac Clayton^[1] (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was an English film director and producer, known for his skill directing literary adaptations.^[2][3] He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for his feature-length debut, Room at the Top (1959), and three of his films were nominated for the Palme d'Or.

Starting out as a teenage studio "tea boy" in 1935, Clayton worked his way up through British film industry in a career that spanned nearly sixty years. He rapidly rose through a series of increasingly important roles in British film production, before shooting to international prominence as a director with his Oscar-winning feature film debut, the drama Room at the Top (1959). This was followed by the much-lauded horror film The Innocents (1961), based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.^[4] He went on to direct such literary adaptations as The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Great Gatsby (1974), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983).

Clayton looked set for a brilliant future, and he was highly regarded by peers and critics alike, but a number of overlapping factors hampered his career. He was a notably 'choosy' director, who by his own admission "never made a film I didn't want to make", and he repeatedly turned down films (including Alien) that became hits for other directors. He was also dogged by bad luck and bad timing – the Hollywood studios labelled him as difficult, and studio politics quashed a string of planned films in the 1970s, which were either taken out of his hands, or cancelled in the final stages of preparation. In 1977, he suffered a double blow: his current film was cancelled just two weeks before shooting was due to begin, and a few months later he suffered a serious stroke which robbed him of the ability to speak, and put his career on hold for five years.

Despite his relatively small oeuvre, the films of Jack Clayton continue to be appreciated, and both they and their director have been widely admired and praised by leading film critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, and by film industry peers including Harold Pinter, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, François Truffaut, Tennessee Williams and Steven Spielberg. The British Film Institute wrote "he could be seen as the most literary of British film-makers, and yet he was also deeply committed to using all the resources offered him by cinema. His films were always carefully crafted but they also contained moments of spontaneity and rawness."^[3]