Karel Reisz (1926–2002)

Karel Reisz was born to a Jewish family in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic). His parents were Fritzi and Josef Reisz, a lawyer. He had an older brother, Paul. In 1938, his parents put 12-year-old Karel alone on a Kindertransport to the UK for safety from the threatened Nazi invasion of his country. Paul was already in England when he arrived. Reisz spoke almost no English at the time, but learned it quickly. After attending Leighton Park, a Quaker school in Reading, he joined the Royal Air Force toward the end of World War II, serving as a fighter pilot in a Czech squadron. He later found out that his parents were both murdered at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. After his war service, Reisz studied chemistry at Cambridge University, and co-founded an influential film journal called Sequence with Lindsay Anderson, Peter Ericsson, and Gavin Lambert in 1947. He began to contribute to other film journals, including Sight and Sound. In 1953, with Gavin Millar, he published The Technique of Film Editing, an acclaimed book that has rarely been out of print since. After working as a program planner at the National Film Theatre, Reisz became a driving force behind the Free Cinema movement, a counterpart of the literary "Angry Young Men." He had his first major success as a director in 1960 with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the seminal works of the British New Wave. He made a total of 11 feature films over 40 years, noted for their intelligence, polish, and psychological acuity. In later years, Reisz worked increasingly as a theater director, staging plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.