Schlesinger's human touch

Schlesinger took a movie risk with The Next Big Thing

John Schlesinger is one of the film world's most respected and versatile directors.

He was born in 1926 into a well-to-do London family which encouraged his artistic leanings right from the start.

His father Bernard, a paediatrician, played the cello while his mother was a violinist and John was an accomplished child pianist as well as an amateur magician.

School life was not so happy for Schlesinger, who was a shy child, though he did manage to make his first film at the age of 11.

Directing love

After an unhappy spell in the army, Schlesinger went to Balliol College, Oxford to study English in 1947.

Here he came into his own, as a prominent member of a variety of drama groups, touring the US with fellow students and directing two films.

All this took its toll on his academic work - he left with a third-class degree - but he was soon acting professionally, appearing in a number of TV productions and films, including Battle Of The River Plate.

Balliol College nurtured Schlesinger's artistic leanings

But directing was his first love and he soon began making short films for the BBC, winning a prize at the Edinburgh Festival for one of them, The Innocent Eye.

The first film Schlesinger made for the cinema was a documentary for British Transport Films called Terminus.

It was a distillation of 24 hours at London's Waterloo station.

"Under one roof we found all the misery, happiness, loneliness, bewilderment and loss to be found anywhere in the world," Schlesinger said at the time.

The film won him a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

He followed Terminus with his first feature, A Kind of Loving, in 1962. Next came Billy Liar in 1963 and Darling in 1965.

Those films were highly acclaimed, if small scale, but his first big budget studio movie, 1967's Far From the Madding Crowd, was a flop.

Cowboy success

But success returned with Midnight Cowboy, the gritty 1969 film about drifters in the US.

That film, which starred Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, received a host of awards, including three for Schlesinger as best director, one of them an Oscar.

Rupert Everett and Madonna in The Next Best Thing

The 1970s passed with a list of great movies and more awards for the director, including a CBE from the Queen in 1970.

Sunday Bloody Sunday was an examination of a difficult relationship between two older people and had four Oscar nominations.

He once said: "Certain themes attract me and solitude is certainly one of them.

"The difficulty of fnding oneself is another and of course the difficulty of finding happiness."

Diversity

In the 1980s Schlesinger began to look to other art forms, diversifying into opera and theatre, to great acclaim.

He continued his film work, shooting The Falcon and The Snowman with Sean Penn in 1984 and Madame Sousatska, the story of an eccentric piano teacher starring Shirley MacLaine, in 1987.

Schlesinger was tempted back to opera for a high profile production of Un Ballo In Maschera with Placido Domingo, conducted by George Solti.

Despite health problems, Schlesinger continues to work on a variety of projects, even directing a music video for Paul McCartney.

He still manages to get the big budget, high profile commissions.

In 1999 he directed The Next Best Thing, starring Madonna as a yoga teacher who becomes pregnant by her gay best friend played by Rupert Everett.

Madonna chose Schlesinger for the project for his unique film sensitivity.

She told the Los Angeles Times at the time: "I thought he could breathe some humanity into the characters and not stereotype them".