Jack Clayton

He later worked for Alexander Korda's Denham Film Studios and rose from tea boy to assistant director to film editor.

While in service with the Royal Air Force during World War II, Clayton shot his first film, the documentary Naples is a Battlefield (1944), representing the problems in the reconstruction of Naples, the first great city liberated in World War II, ruined after Allied bombing and destruction caused by the retreating Nazis. After the war Clayton became an associate producer on many of Korda's films, then directed the Oscar-winning short The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) based on Wolf Mankowitz's theatrical version (1953) of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat (1842). In this film Gogol's story is re-located to a clothing warehouse in the East End of London and the ghostly protagonist is a poor Jew.

His first feature was the internationally acclaimed Room at the Top (1959), a harsh indictment of the British class system, which won two Oscars, earned Clayton a Best Director nomination, and was credited with spearheading Britain's movement toward realism in films; in fact that film inaugurated a series of realist films known as the British New Wave, which featured for that time, unusually sincere treatments of sexual mores and introduced a new maturity into British cinema. Read Less