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John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director and actor. Schlesinger was born in London into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor. Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre and The Vise. He began his... MORE

John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director and actor. Schlesinger was born in London into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor. Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre and The Vise. He began his directorial career in 1956 with the short documentary Sunday in the Park about London's Hyde Park. In 1959 he was credited as exterior or second unit director on 23 episodes of the TV series The Four Just Men and four 30-minute episodes of the series of Danger Man. By the 1960s, he had virtually given up acting to concentrate on a directing career, and another of his earlier directorial efforts, the British Transport Films' documentary Terminus (1961), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set LESS