Karel Reisz

Karel Reisz (21 July 1926 – 25 November 2002) was a Czech‑born British filmmaker whose work helped define the new realist strain of British cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Ostrava to a Jewish family, he escaped Czechoslovakia in 1938 as one of Sir Nicholas Winton’s 669 rescued children, arriving in England with barely any knowledge of English and quickly shedding his foreign accent. After attending Leighton Park School he served in the Royal Air Force toward the end of World War II, only to learn after the war that both of his parents had perished in Auschwitz. He then studied Natural Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and began writing for influential film journals such as Sight and Sound. In 1947 he co‑founded the critical magazine Sequence with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert, laying the groundwork for the Free Cinema movement that would soon champion documentary realism. His 1953 textbook The Technique of Film Editing became a standard reference for editors, and his first short documentary, Momma Don’t Allow (1955), co‑directed with Tony Richardson, debuted in the inaugural Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre. Subsequent documentaries like We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) captured the everyday lives of working‑class youths with an unflinching observational style, earning international recognition at the Venice Film Festival.

Reisz’s first feature, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s novel, translated his documentary sensibility to narrative cinema, delivering a stark portrait of post‑war industrial England and launching Albert Finney to stardom. Over the next two decades he alternated between British and American projects, directing the period drama Isadora (1968), the gritty crime film The Gambler (1974), and the acclaimed adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, which remains his most commercially successful work. In addition to film, Reisz devoted the 1990s to theatre, directing works by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett at venues in London, Dublin, Paris and New York, and he contributed to television with productions such as Adventure Story (1961) and The Deep Blue Sea (1994). He was married first to Julia Werthimer, with whom he had three sons, and later to actress Betsy Blair, remaining together until his death in Camden, London. Reisz’s legacy endures through his influential editing manual, his pioneering role in Free Cinema, and a body of work that continually demonstrates the power of realism combined with narrative elegance.