Tony Richardson Filmography

Born:: June 5, 1928 in Shipley, Yorkshire, England, UK
Occupation:: Director, Producer, Screenwriter
Birth name:: Cecil Antonio Richardson
Biography:: A graduate of Oxford, Tony Richardson rose from head of the university's dramatic society to the pinnacle of the British film industry during the early 1960s, scoring several theatrical successes as a director along the way, most notably Look Back In Anger, by John Osborne, with whom Richardson...Read More

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Blue Sky

Crew: Director

Actors: Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones, Powers Boothe, Carrie Snodgress, Amy Locane

Synopsis: Blue Sky was the last film directed by Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) before his death in 1991 and one of the last releases from once-thriving Orion Films, whose bankruptcy kept the picture on the shelf for several years. It also features two career-high performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange Read More

1994
Women and Men: Stories of Seduction

Crew: Director

Actors: Melanie Griffith, Elizabeth McGovern, Molly Ringwald, Peter Weller, James Woods

Synopsis: Originally aired on HBO, Women and Men: Stories of Seduction is a short-film anthology that brings to life three famous short stories. Mary McCarthy's "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" stars Elizabeth McGovern and Beau Bridges. The second, Dorothy Parker's "Dusk Before Fireworks," features Peter Weller Read More

1990
The Phantom of the Opera

Crew: Director

Actors: Jean-Pierre Cassel, Ian Richardson, Burt Lancaster, Teri Polo, Charles Dance

Synopsis: This adaptation of Gaston Leroux's indefatigable "grand guignol" piece The Phantom of the Opera stars British actor Charles Dance as Erik the Phantom. This adaptation by playwright Arthur Kopit soft-pedals the horrific elements of the story to concentrate on the love the tragic Erik bears toward Read More

1990
Shadow on the Sun

Crew: Director

Actors: Stefanie Powers

Synopsis: Beryl Markham: Shadow on the Sun was a two-part TV movie originally telecast in May of 1988. Stefanie Powers is right in her element as the real-life Beryl Markham, an Englishwoman living in Kenya with her family. Bucking the male-dominated Kenyan social structure, Beryl becomes the first woman in Read More

1988
Penalty Phase

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Chaves, Peter Strauss

Synopsis: Tony Richardson, who in his days of prominence directed the Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963), demonstrated in 1986's Penalty Phase that the intervening years did not dim his talent in the least. Peter Strauss stars as a liberal judge, in the midst of a re-election campaign. Strauss has been under Read More

1986
The Hotel New Hampshire

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Jodie Foster, Beau Bridges, Rob Lowe, Nastassja Kinski, Wilford Brimley

Synopsis: This macabre, whimsical, erotic, dark, seriocomic film is a complex tale about an eccentric family and the psychological and emotional maelstroms that follow them around from New England to New York to Vienna, where the Hotel New Hampshire is located. Writer-director Tony Richardson worked from Read More

1984
The Border

Crew: Director

Actors: Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Valerie Perrine, Warren Oates, Elpidia Carrillo

Synopsis: Tom Jones director Tony Richardson might seem a curious choice to direct the contemporary western The Border, but he does his best to emulate Sam Peckinpah. Jack Nicholson stars as an El Paso border guard, saddled with avaricious wife Valerie Perrine. Hoping to stifle her nagging about money Read More

1982
A Death in Canaan

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Clemens, Stefanie Powers

Synopsis: Paul Clemens plays the real-life Peter Reilly, who in September of 1973 was charged with the mutilation and murder of his mother. The confused 18-year-old signs a confession after being told that he's flunked a lie detector test. Later renouncing the confession, Reilly demands a reopening of his Read More

1978
Joseph Andrews

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Ann-Margret, Peter Firth, Michael Hordern, Beryl Reid, Jim Dale

Synopsis: Tony Richardson attempts to re-create the glory days of Tom Jones in this adaptation of the 1742 Henry Fielding novel. Peter Firth stars in this picaresque tale as Joseph Andrews, a young servant switched at birth who undergoes a series of romantic escapades. Joseph even has the fortune of Read More

1977
Dead Cert

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Scott Antony, Judi Dench, Michael Williams

Synopsis: Based on a book by National Hunt jockey Dick Francis, the horseracing thriller Dead Cert was filmed in the village of Findon, West Sussex, U.K. When jockey Bill Davidson (Ian Hogg) is killed in a horseracing incident, his best friend Alan York (Scott B. Anthony) decides to investigate. He believes Read More

1974
A Delicate Balance

Crew: Director

Actors: Betsy Blair, Joseph Cotten, Katharine Hepburn, Kate Reid, Lee Remick, Paul Scofield

Synopsis: A Delicate Balance is the 1973 film adaptation of Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield play an old married couple, Agnes and Tobias, who much prefer to be alone. Each time someone visits them, their "delicate balance" is threatened. The first intruder is Read More

1973
Ned Kelly

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Jack Allan, Claire Balmford, Tony Bazell, Kurt Beimel, Mick Jagger, Clarissa Kaye, Mark McManus

Synopsis: Ned Kelly (Mick Jagger) is the legendary outlaw of the Australian outback sought by authorities for stealing horses. At age 20, Ned has already served a three-year prison term at hard labor. When Ned's mother (Clarissa Kaye) is arrested and jailed on a bogus murder charge, Ned offers to surrender Read More

1970
Hamlet

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Nicol Williamson, Gordon Jackson, Anthony Hopkins, Judy Parfitt, Mark Dignam

Synopsis: Perhaps the reason there are so many filmed versions of Hamlet is that in each decade every great Shakespeareian actor, and almost any movie actor with a yen to prove his versatility wants to tilt at this particular thespian windmill. Aside from the much more difficult King Lear, it is also one of Read More

1969
Laughter in the Dark

Crew: Director

Actors: Nicol Williamson, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Drouchet, Sheila Burrell, Sian Phillips

Synopsis: Set in London and the Riviera, Laughter in the Dark stars Nicol Williamson as Edward, a wealthy, knighted art dealer who falls hard for tartish usherette Margot (Anna Karina). She is kept by a glorified pimp (Jean-Claude Drouot), who conspires with the girl to take Edward for everything he's got. Read More

1969
The Charge of the Light Brigade

Crew: Director

Actors: Trevor Howard, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Harry Andrews, Jill Bennett

Synopsis: During the ill-fated charge of British troops at Balaclava in the Crimean War, loyal soldiers who blindly followed orders were led to certain death. This is the fifth time the story has been told on film, but the actual event is an afterthought to the main plot. Snobbish aristocrats and Read More

1968
The Sailor from Gibraltar

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Jeanne Moreau, Ian Bannen, Vanessa Redgrave, Hugh Griffith

Synopsis: Playwright Christopher Isherwood and co-writer/director Tony Richardson adapted the novel by Marguerite Duras into this romantic drama. Jeanne Moreau plays Anna, a Frenchwoman of means who experienced fleeting true love with a sailor many years before. In the interim, her husband killed himself Read More

1967
Red and Blue

Crew: Director

1967
Mademoiselle

Crew: Director

Actors: Jeanne Moreau, Ettore Manni, Umberto Orsini, Keith Skinner, Jeanne Beretta, Mony Rey

Synopsis: In 1951, French writer Jean Genet presented a screenplay called "Les Rêves Interdits/L'Autre Versant du Rêve" to actress Anouk Aimée as a wedding gift. He then proceeded to sell the rights three times without telling her. Eventually the script was reworked by Marguerite Duras and filmed by British Read More

1966
The Loved One

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert Morse, Anjanette Comer, Jonathan Winters, Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Dana Andrews

Synopsis: The satire in Evelyn Waugh's darkly comic novel The Loved One was originally double-edged. The book was not only an attack on the Southern California funeral industry but also a lampoon of Hollywood's "British colony," those clannish, cricket-playing English actors of years gone by who bemoaned Read More

1965
Girl With Green Eyes

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Peter Finch, Rita Tushingham, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Kean, Julian Glover

Synopsis: Rita Tushingham was propelled into stardom with The Girl with Green Eyes. She plays a gawky young rural Irish girl who takes a room with a wise-cracking Dublin lass (Lynn Redgrave). Enter a middle-aged writer (Peter Finch), who makes a beeline for the shy, lonely Tushingham--completely ignoring Read More

1964
Tom Jones

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood

Synopsis: Tony Richardson's adaptation of Henry Fielding's classic novel was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular comedies of its time, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film follows Tom Jones (Albert Finney), a country boy who becomes one of the wildest playboys in 18th Read More

1963
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, James Bolam, Avis Bunnage, James Cairncross, Alec McCowen, Peter Madden

Synopsis: One of the key "angry young man" films which helped define the British "Kitchen Sink Drama" style of the late 1950's and early 60's, this story centers on Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay), a bitter young man from a working-class family. Uninterested in school and determined not to follow his father Read More

1962
Sanctuary

Crew: Director

Actors: Lee Remick, Yves Montand, Bradford Dillman, Harry Townes, Odette

Synopsis: Combining elements from William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, its sequel Requiem for a Nun, and a stage adaptation of Requiem for a Nun by Ruth Ford, director Tony Richardson's film is set in 1920s Mississippi and recounts the story of Temple Drake (Lee Remick), a young, lustful white woman who Read More

1961
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Crew: Producer

Actors: Albert Finney, Shirley Ann Field, Rachel Roberts, Hylda Baker, Norman Rossington

Synopsis: "All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda." That's the philosophy of archetypal British "angry young man" Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney). A middle-class working stiff in a dead-end job, Arthur's principal goal in life is to survive the work week, then spend the weekend raising as much hell Read More

1961
A Taste of Honey

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Dora Bryan, Rita Tushingham, Robert Stephens, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah

Synopsis: Director Tony Richardson adapted the screenplay of A Taste of Honey from the "kitchen sink" stage play by Shelagh Delaney. Rita Tushingham plays a working-class British teenager, living with her drink-sodden, libertine mother Dora Bryan. Denied affection by her selfish mother, Tushingham is pushed Read More

1961
The Entertainer

Crew: Director

Actors: Laurence Olivier, Brenda de Banzie, Joan Plowright, Roger Livesey, Alan Bates, Albert Finney

Synopsis: Laurence Olivier recreates his stage role of Archie Rice in this in-your-face film adaptation of John Osborne's play. The son of a legendary music hall comedian (Roger Livesey), Archie is strictly a third-rater, headlining a tacky music hall revue in a seedy seaside resort town. Archie can't admit Read More

1960
Look Back in Anger

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Mary Ure, Edith Evans, Gary Raymond

Synopsis: Archetypal British "angry young man" Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is a college-educated bloke who can't seem to get any better job than working in a candy store. Jimmy's relationship with his wife Alison (Mary Ure) alternates between hugs and kisses when he's feeling good and verbal abuse when Read More

1958
Momma Don't Allow

Crew: Director

1956
Josephine and Men

Crew: Director

Actors: Glynis Johns, Jack Buchanan, Donald Sinden, Peter Finch, Heather Thatcher

Synopsis: In this romantic comedy, a womanizing uncle tells the story of his good-hearted but fickle niece, whose tendency to always champion the underdog causes her endless romantic woes. It all begins when she breaks up with her fiance on the eve of their wedding so she can marry and help out a Read More

1955