John Brabourne

John Ulick Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne, CBE (9 November 1924 – 23 September 2005), professionally known as John Brabourne, was a British peer, television producer and Oscar-nominated film producer. Brabourne was born in 1924, the second son of Michael Knatchbull, 5th Baron Brabourne, and his wife, Lady Doreen Browne. He was educated at Eton College and Brasenose College, Oxford. In the late 1940s, shortly after leaving the army, Brabourne began working as an assistant production manager for certain television productions, mostly based on war-related themes. He graduated to the role of production manager by the early 1950s, and finally became a producer in his own right in 1958, with Harry Black a romantic story set in India, with war as the distant context. Počátky filmové kariéry This was followed by Sink the Bismarck! (1960). Brabourne began his film career as a production manager on such movies as Pursuit of the Graf Spee (1956) (1956) and he later co-produced the wartime drama Sink the Bismarck! War, empire and India were recurrent themes in his work, and A Passage to India (1984) is among his films. In 1970, he founded Mersham Productions, a production house named after his family seat in Kent, which produced many of his works thereafter. Shakespearovské adaptace a největší úspěchy In the sixties he produced two celebrated Shakespeare adaptations, the film of Othello (1965) starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith and Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet (1968). John Brabourne received two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, as producer of Romeo and Juliet (1968) and A Passage to India. Film Romeo and Juliet se stal jedním z nejúspěšnějších shakespearovských filmů všech dob a přinesl Brabourne jeho první nominaci na Oscara. Brabourne went on to produce a series of box office hits including Up the Junction (1968), The Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) starring Albert Finney, Death on the Nile (1978) with Peter Ustinov, The Mirror Crack'd (1980) with Elizabeth Taylor, Evil Under the Sun (1982) (1982) again with Ustinov, and Little Dorrit (1987) starring Alec Guinness. Murder on the Orient Express is a 1974 British mystery film directed by Sidney Lumet, produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, and based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Agatha Christie. Pozdější kariéra a uznání It was written and directed by Christine Edzard, and produced by John Brabourne and Richard B. Goodwin. Film Little Dorrit z roku 1987 představoval adaptaci Dickensova románu a stal se jedním z posledních významných projektů Brabourne kariéry. He served as a director of Thames Television (later chairman) and Euston Films from 1978 to 1995, and a director of Thorn EMI from 1981 to 1986. In 1985, Brabourne was invested as a Fellow of the British Film Institute, an organisation he also served as a Governor. In 1993, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Lord Brabourne died in 2005 at his home in Kent at the age of 80.