Alexander Bassano, “Anthony Asquith”, 1927, Whole Plate Glass Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London

Born in November of 1902 in London, Anthony Asquith was an English film director. He was the son of Margot Asquith and Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. Along with Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed and David Lean, Anthony Asquith was one of the internationally acclaimed British film directors at the top of the profession in the 1950s and 1960s.

A reluctant aristocrat, Anthony Asquith was educated at the private Eaton House, Winchester College in Hampshire and, from 1921 to 1925, Balliol College, Oxford. Although he was interested in music, he decided to pursue a career in the rapidly growing British film industry. Asquith traveled in 1920 to Hollywood to observe American film production techniques. In England, he made his debut as a silent film director with the 1927 British black comedy “Shooting Stars”. Asquith followed the comedy with the 1928 drama “Underground”, a story of four lives that intersect in London’s underground tube network.

Asquith’s work in silent film was influenced by the German Expressionist film movement and was experimental in nature. This can be seen in his best-known silent film, the 1930 “A Cottage on Dartmoor”, known for its meticulous and emotional frame composition. Asquith’s tense, shocking thriller, which stylistically brings to mind the early work of Alfred Hitchcock, is filled with innovative camera work by Stanley Ridwell and fast editing work to produce an eerie and unpredictable atmosphere. In his role of director, Asquith was a master of atmosphere and extracted the most emotion from dramatic situations. He became known as an actor’s director and was able to get some of the finest performances from Britain’s greatest actors.

The majority of Anthony Asquith’s oeuvre was divided between semi-documentaries and the adaptation of plays and novels. These he staged in a stylistically restrained, tasteful, but nuanced manner. In collaboration with English playwright Terence Rattigan as screenplay writer, Asquith directed film adaptations of ten famous plays written by Rattigan. Among these adaptations were the 1948 “The Winslow Boy”, “The Browning Version” in 1951, and the 1940 “French Without Tears”, Rattigan’s first successful play which premiered in 1936. 

One of Asquith’s best known films is the 1938 “Pygmalion”, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 stage play, which Asquith co-directed with its star Leslie Howard. A critical success even in the United States, the film received multiple Academy Award nominations; Bernard Shaw won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Asquith’s most successful postwar film was probably his 1952 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest”; it still remains today, after seventy years, the best adaptation of  Oscar Wilde’s work. 

In the 1960’s, Anthony Asquith was directing lavish all-star productions. He was one of only three British directors who were directing major international motion picture productions in that time period. Asquith directed the 1963 British comedy-drama film “The V,I.P.s” with a large cast that included Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Orson Welles and Margaret Rutherford, among others. The film, shot from a screenplay by Terence Rattigan, was distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Margaret Rutherford, cast as the Duchess of Brighton, won the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. 

Asquith’s next project was the 1964 “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” with a screenplay by Rattigan and production by Anatole de Grunwald. The twenty-three member cast of this drama included such stars as Rex Harrison, Ingrid Bergman, Shirley MacLaine, Omar Sharif and George C. Scott. In the early part of 1967, Asquith was signed to direct the 1968 big screen adaptation of Australian author Morris West’s “The Shoes of the Fisherman”. This American political drama of Vatican and Cold War intrigue included a major cast with such stars as Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. Due to ill health in November of 1967, Asquith dropped out of its production. 

The Honorable Anthony Asquith died in February of 1968 of cancer, at the age of sixty-five, in London, England. He was buried at All Saints Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire, England. Over the course of his career, Asquith directed forty-two films and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society. In his honor, the British Academy Award for Best Music is named the Anthony Asquith Award. 

“Although I was sparing with the big individual close-ups, I was tempted in the scene where Edith Evan’s voice goes up three octaves on a single syllable when she says the word “hanndb-a-g”. On films, as you know, voices haven’t need to be raised to reach the back of the gallery. We take care of that, and actors and actresses keep their voices right down. In the case of (the character) Lady Bracknell, however, it was different: she is a monster anyway and she is more than life-size, and certainly Edith Evans IS life-size. I didn’t try to modify her performance in any way, because it seemed to me to be splendid.”  —Anthony Asquith on directing “The Importance of Being Ernest”

Notes: It was Asquith’s father, Herbert Henry Asquith, serving as Home Secretary, who ordered Oscar Wilde’s arrest for his homosexual behavior. This arrest for indecent behavior led to Wilde’s incarceration in the Reading Jail and personally destroyed the playwright. The arrest and imprisonment of Wilde affected gay culture in Britain for most of the twentieth-century. The irony of Herbert Henry Asquith’s participation in this event is that Anthony Asquith, his youngest son, was gay.

English theatrical actress Edith Evans is considered the greatest actress on the English stage in the twentieth-century. Over a career of more than fifty years, she appeared in modern and classical roles in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York City. In 1946, Edith Evans was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood. 

Film historian Peter Cowie, a specialist in Swedish cinema, wrote an excellent article for the Criterion Channel on the Anthony Asquith’s life and his major film adaptations. The article can be found on the Criterion Channel’s website located at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4495-anthony-asquith

Top Insert Image: Howard Coster, “Anthony Asquith”, 1935, Bromide Print, 15.8 x 11.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “A Cottage on Dartmoor”, (Hans Adalbert Schiettow and Norah Baring), 1921, Cinematography Stanley Rodwell

Third Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “Libel”, 1959, Film Pster, Cinematography Robert Krasker 

Fourth Insert Image: Anthony Asquith, “The Net”, (James Donald and Phyllis Calvert), 1953, Cinematography Desmond Dickinson

Bottom Insert Image: Ernest Cyril Stanborough, “Anthony Asquith”, 1930s, Bromide Print, 22.7 x 17.7 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London