Anderson, Lindsay (1932-1994)

British film director. As critic and then film-maker, he championed the cause of commitment to moral and social beliefs; his best-known film If.. (1968) enunciated a message of social protest using surrealist humour and distancing effects.

He won an Academy Award for his film Thursday's Children (1953), a documentary about deaf children. He also acted on television and in films, most notably the Olympics drama Chariots of Fire (1981).

After wartime army service Anderson went to Oxford, where be became involved in the influential film magazine Sequence. He began to direct documentary shorts, notably Every Day Except Christmas (1957), a poetic impression of London's Covent Garden vegetable market.

His first feature film was This Sporting Life (1963), which ostensibly belonged to the then prevalent mode of northern realism; his later work includes O Lucky Man (1973). Anderson also pursued a parallel career in the theatre, directing a variety of productions, which ranged from work by ambitious modern writers, such as David Storey, to popular plays and occasional classic revivals.

In 1988 he directed his only US film, The Whales of August, a touching portrait of two elderly sisters.