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Guy Hamilton
Mervyn Ian Guy Hamilton DSC (16 September 1922 – 20 April 2016) was an English film director. He directed 22 films from the 1950s to the 1980s, including four James Bond films.
Hamilton was born in Paris on 16 September 1922, son of Frederick William Guy Hamilton (1895-1988), press attaché to the British embassy in Paris and Captain in the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, and Winifred Grace Culling (1895-1970), daughter of William Archibald Culling Fremantle, of the Church Missionary Society in India. His mother was a great-granddaughter of the Christian campaigner Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet, and of the politician Thomas Fremantle, 1st Baron Cottesloe. His parents divorced in 1923, and Hamilton was educated in England at Haileybury College. He later said, "The cinema, more specifically the storytelling part of the cinema, really fascinated me. From the age of ten, till I was about fourteen or fifteen, a holiday was a lousy one if I didn’t see one picture a day." He said a crucial event was seeing La bête humaine (1938) which "absolutely knocked me out. It was as if I grew up immediately... I just knew that’s where I wanted to make my career."
Hamilton's first exposure to the film industry came in 1938, when he was a clapperboard boy at the Victorine Studios in Nice. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Hamilton escaped from France by the MV Saltersgate, a collier bound for French North Africa; one of the other 500 refugees aboard was W. Somerset Maugham.
Having travelled from Oran to Gibraltar before arriving in London, he worked in the film library at Paramount News before being commissioned in the Royal Navy; he served in the 15th Motor Torpedo Boat 718 Flotilla, a unit that ferried agents into France and brought downed British pilots back to England.
During this service, he was left behind for a month in occupied Brittany; he was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
After the war Hamilton wanted to get into film production. He said " In my absence, the unions had become very powerful, and I couldn’t get a ‘ticket’—you couldn’t get a job in the film business if you didn’t have a ticket. So I had to do quite a lot of stalling around but finally—finally—I got in as a third assistant director." He managed to get a job on a second unit in Dartmoor on a Trevor Heid picture.[specify] Then he was put under contract by Alexander Korda as a third assistant director. Over the next few years he worked his way up to a first assistant director.
Hamilton later said, "I found that working with bad directors was infinitely more useful because you watched them get into trouble three times a day and puddle around and you say, you know, I won't do that, I don't want to fall into that trap."
He worked on They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Mine Own Executioner (1947), Anna Karenina (1948), and The Fallen Idol (1949) directed by Carol Reed. "I was devoted to Carol," said Hamilton later. "He made my life easy because I followed him around like a little dog while learning my trade. If you’d ask him a question, he’d always answer it...Carol Reed was the biggest influence on me and on everything that I did."
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Guy Hamilton
Mervyn Ian Guy Hamilton DSC (16 September 1922 – 20 April 2016) was an English film director. He directed 22 films from the 1950s to the 1980s, including four James Bond films.
Hamilton was born in Paris on 16 September 1922, son of Frederick William Guy Hamilton (1895-1988), press attaché to the British embassy in Paris and Captain in the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, and Winifred Grace Culling (1895-1970), daughter of William Archibald Culling Fremantle, of the Church Missionary Society in India. His mother was a great-granddaughter of the Christian campaigner Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet, and of the politician Thomas Fremantle, 1st Baron Cottesloe. His parents divorced in 1923, and Hamilton was educated in England at Haileybury College. He later said, "The cinema, more specifically the storytelling part of the cinema, really fascinated me. From the age of ten, till I was about fourteen or fifteen, a holiday was a lousy one if I didn’t see one picture a day." He said a crucial event was seeing La bête humaine (1938) which "absolutely knocked me out. It was as if I grew up immediately... I just knew that’s where I wanted to make my career."
Hamilton's first exposure to the film industry came in 1938, when he was a clapperboard boy at the Victorine Studios in Nice. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Hamilton escaped from France by the MV Saltersgate, a collier bound for French North Africa; one of the other 500 refugees aboard was W. Somerset Maugham.
Having travelled from Oran to Gibraltar before arriving in London, he worked in the film library at Paramount News before being commissioned in the Royal Navy; he served in the 15th Motor Torpedo Boat 718 Flotilla, a unit that ferried agents into France and brought downed British pilots back to England.
During this service, he was left behind for a month in occupied Brittany; he was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
After the war Hamilton wanted to get into film production. He said " In my absence, the unions had become very powerful, and I couldn’t get a ‘ticket’—you couldn’t get a job in the film business if you didn’t have a ticket. So I had to do quite a lot of stalling around but finally—finally—I got in as a third assistant director." He managed to get a job on a second unit in Dartmoor on a Trevor Heid picture.[specify] Then he was put under contract by Alexander Korda as a third assistant director. Over the next few years he worked his way up to a first assistant director.
Hamilton later said, "I found that working with bad directors was infinitely more useful because you watched them get into trouble three times a day and puddle around and you say, you know, I won't do that, I don't want to fall into that trap."
He worked on They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Mine Own Executioner (1947), Anna Karenina (1948), and The Fallen Idol (1949) directed by Carol Reed. "I was devoted to Carol," said Hamilton later. "He made my life easy because I followed him around like a little dog while learning my trade. If you’d ask him a question, he’d always answer it...Carol Reed was the biggest influence on me and on everything that I did."