Motion Picture Director, Theatrical Producer, Journalist, Actor. Considered one of the most gifted and influential figures of British Cinema, he was born in Bangalore, India, the son of a British Army Major General He was educated at Cheltenham College (later the setting for his film "If...") and Oxford, and served in the British Army during World War II. As a prominent critic in the 1950s, he co-founded and edited the film journal "Sequence" (1947 to 1952), and was the leading advocate of the Free Cinema movement (1956 to 1959). He vigorously advocated new directions for British films, "a return to the everyday" that acknowledged the lives and issues of ordinary people. This approach was apparent in his early documentaries "O Dreamland" (1953), "Thursday's Children" (1954), which won an Academy Award, and "Every Day Except Christmas" (1957), winner of the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival. From 1958 to 1975 Anderson was a director at London's Royal Court Theatre, a partnership that culminated in a rich collaboration with playwright David Storey ("In Celebration", "Home", "The Changing Room") and a landmark 1975 revival of Joe Orton's farce "What the Butler Saw", which launched Orton's posthumous reputation. Owing to a combative personality and an uncompromising approach to material, he was able to realize only a handful of feature films, with many receiving critical acclaim: "This Sporting Life" (1963), "The White Bus" (1967), "If…" (1968), which won the Golden Palm at Cannes, "O Lucky Man!" (1973), "Brittania Hospital" (1982), and "The Whales of August" (1987). He also occasionally appeared as an actor, notably in "Chariots of Fire" (1981), and he published the study "About John Ford" (1981). His last work, the autobiographical television documentary "Is That All There Is?", went unseen for two years before it was aired in September 1994, a few weeks after Anderson's death from a heart attack.