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Jack Clayton (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was a British film director, who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen. Starting out as a teenage studio "tea boy" in 1935, Clayton worked his way up through British film industry in a career that spanned nearly 60 years. He rapidly rose through a series of increasingly important roles in British film production, before shooting to international prominence as a director with his Oscar-winning feature film debut, the landmark 1959 drama ''Room at the Top''. Clayton looked set for a brilliant future, and he was highly regarded by peers and critics alike, but a number of overlapping factors hampered his career. He was a notably 'choosy' director, who by his own admission "never made a film I didn't want to make", and he repeatedly turned down films (including ''Alien'') that became huge hits for other directors. But he was also dogged by bad luck and bad timing - the Hollywood studios labelled him as 'difficult', and studio politics quashed a string of planned films in the 1970s, which were either taken out of his hands, or cancelled in the final stages of preparation. In 1977 he suffered a double blow - his current film was cancelled just two weeks before shooting was due to begin, and a few months later he suffered a serious stroke which robbed him of the ability to speak, and put his career on hold for five years. Although Clayton worked almost constantly on a wide range of significant projects during his years as a director, most either never made it into production, or wound up being made by other directors, and he was only able to complete seven feature films before his death in 1995. However, despite this relatively small ''oeuvre'', the films of Jack Clayton continue to be appreciated, and both they and their director have been widely admired and praised by leading film critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, and by film industry peers including Harold Pinter, Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, François Truffaut, Tennessee Williams and Steven Spielberg. ==Early life and career, 1921–58== Born in Brighton,〔( Clayton, Jack (1921–1995) ), BFI screenonline〕 Clayton started his career as a child actor on the 1929 film ''Dark Red Roses''.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/30728?view=synopsis )〕 Giving up on his earlier aspiration to become a speed skater〔(Tony Sloman, "Obituary: Jack Clayton", ''The Independent", 28 February 1995 )〕 he joined Alexander Korda's Denham Film Studios in 1935 at the age of 14,〔Brian McFarlane (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of British Film'', London: Methuen/BFI, 2003, p.125〕 and rose from tea boy to assistant director to film editor. During the war years Clayton worked on many notable British features, including the first British Technicolor film ''Wings of the Morning'' (1937), and worked with visiting American directors, including Thornton Freeland on ''Over the Moon'' (1939) and Tim Whelan on ''Q Planes'' (1939). As a second assistant director he co-ordinated all three shooting units on Korda's lavish Technicolor fantasy ''The Thief of Baghdad'' (1940), having previously worked with ''Thief'' co-director Michael Powell on the noted "quota quickie" ''The Spy in Black'' (1939). He also gained invaluable editing experience assisting David Lean, who was the editor (and uncredited director) of the screen adaptation of Shaw's ''Major Barbara'' (1941).〔 While in service with the Royal Air Force film unit 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, he was second-unit director on Gordon Parry's ''Bond Street'' (1948) and production manager on Korda's ''An Ideal Husband'' (1947).〔 Clayton married actress Christine Norden in 1947, but they divorced in 1953. In the early 1950s Clayton became an associate producer, working on several of the John and James Woolf's Romulus Films productions, including ''Moulin Rouge'' (1952) and ''Beat the Devil'' (1953), both directed by John Huston. It was during the making of ''Moulin Rouge'' that Clayton met his second wife, French actress Katherine Kath (born Lilly Faess), who portrayed legendary can-can dancer "La Goulue" in the film; they married in 1953, following Clayton's divorce from Norden, but the marriage was short-lived. It was also during this period that Clayton first met rising British star Laurence Harvey, with whom he worked on both ''The Good Die Young'' (1954) and ''I Am a Camera'' (1955). In 1956 he made his second film as a director, the Oscar winning short ''The Bespoke Overcoat'' (1956) for Romulus. 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. Clayton also worked as producer on a series of screen farces during 1956, including ''Three Men in a Boat'' (again with Laurence Harvey), followed by the thriller ''The Whole Truth'', which starred Stewart Granger as a movie producer.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jack Clayton」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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