Norman Spencer, the British producer, manufacturing supervisor and screenwriter who frequently collaborated with director David Lean within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, has died. He was 110.
The “Vanishing Level” producer died Aug. 16 in Wimbledon three days after his birthday, the European Supercentenarian Organisation reported.
Spencer labored with Lean on movies together with “Blithe Spirit,” “Nice Expectations,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” Other than his fellow Briton, he assistant-produced Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Southern gothic whodunit “Instantly, Final Summer season” (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, in addition to co-produced Richard Attenborough’s apartheid drama “Cry Freedom” (1987), starring Denzel Washington.
Norman Leslie Spencer was born in London on Aug. 13, 1914, and grew up in Essex. He started his profession within the movie business within the mid-Nineteen Thirties working as an additional and was a gofer at Denham Movie Studios, the place he first met Lean, an editor, in 1942.
“We took a shine to one another — we had been each mad about movie and began going to the photographs along with our wives,” Spencer mentioned in a 1999 interview for the British Leisure Historical past Venture.
“We began making movies collectively,” he added, and “after we’d completed one, we’d at all times wish to make one other instantly. We’d hang-out bookshops, and he’d say, ‘Inside 9 ft of us is a superb concept for a movie.’ ”
Spencer’s massive break got here with Lean’s directorial debut, “In Which We Serve” (1942), on which he served as third assistant director. He additionally had a small half as an officer within the movie.
In 1944, he launched Cineguild Productions alongside Lean, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, playwright Noël Coward and filmmaker Ronald Neame. He additionally labored for 3 years as an govt assistant underneath Elmo Williams, head of European manufacturing for Fox, in line with the Hollywood Reporter.
Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and the couple have two kids, per IMDb.
On the time of his demise, Spencer was considered the oldest man dwelling within the Larger London space, and the second-oldest man dwelling in the UK total.
