Brian Cox on Lindsay Anderson

Published: April 8, 2022, 8:11 a.m.

Actor Brian Cox chooses his one-time mentor and fellow Scot, Lindsay Anderson. "His effect is still on me to this day, and I can't throw him off. He taught me how to think. He triggered something off in me that nobody else had previously done."

A critic, an outsider, a provocateur, Anderson founded the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s with fellow documentary makers Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lorenza Mazzetti. His films include This Sporting Life and If\u2026 which won the Palm d\u2019or in 1969 and helped launch the career of Malcolm MacDowell.\n \nLindsay Anderson\u2019s international reputation surpassed his fame in Britain, where his uncompromisingly anti-establishment stance failed to win him mainstream admirers, but he made several more provocative films and is remembered fondly by his friends and collaborators as an extremely funny, loyal and principled man.

Brian Cox, star of Rushmore, The Bourne Identity and Succession, is joined by Karl Magee from the Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling. \n \nPresented by Matthew Parris and produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Ellie Richold.

Future programmes in this series include journalist Donald McIntyre on the editor of Picture Post, Tom Hopkinson; Janet Ellis on the founder of the Puffin Club, Kaye Webb; and Terry Christian on Mr Manchester, Tony Wilson, along with author Paul Morley who wrote From Manchester With Love.