British director who, after being near the forefront of several 'new
waves' in British cinema, has unexpectedly carved himself an international career in the
past ten years. Although his output has been uneven, it has also proved extraordinarily
wide-ranging while rarely failing to highlight his ability to obtain crowd-pleasing
performances from his principal players.
He had begun as an assistant to such seminal figures of Britain's neo-realist
movement of the 1960s as Karel Reisz and
Lindsay Anderson
but, after extensive experience directing popular regional TV series,
had an immediate cinema hit of his own with Gumshoe
(1971), featuring Albert Finney,
whose assistant director he had been on Charlie Bubbles (1967). A spoof
of forties' detective thrillers, it catches a winning mood and holds
it. The film seemed to herald the arrival of a major new director on
the British scene, but in practice Frears returned to television for
more than a decade.
Projects for Channel 4 and the BBC that were shown in cinemas outside
Britain edged him back towards the movie scene. But his first film specifically
for the cinema in 13 years, The
Hit (1984), belied its title and it took Channel 4 to come to the
rescue with My
Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which combined Frears' traits of grittiness
and scabrous humour in its treatment of a script that is funny, sexy,
violent and perceptive by turns with in its observation of the central
gay love story. Intended for TV, this instead proved a big success in
cinemas, encouraging Frears to try his hand at bigger screen stuff,
notably Prick Up
Your Ears (1987), a biopic of the gay and self-destructive playwright
Joe Orton.
The award winning Dangerous Liaisons (1988) set Frears up for the international
career that had long interested him, although his work within that framework
has been rather more variable, from the underrated The Grifters (1990)
and one of Frears' best mainstream films, Accidental Hero (1992). He
took a couple of years to recover from the disappointing Mary Reilly
(1996). There were two Irish black comedy-dramas, the excellent The
Snapper (1993) and the rather less successful The Van (1996). A worthy
career, if not quite yet an auteur's one. After a Hollywood hit with
High Fidelity (2000), Frears returned to the gritty realism of his indie
past with the urban thriller Dirty
Pretty Things (2002).
