Born November 9: Anthony Asquith

Everyone knows that Anthony Asquith's father was Prime Minister during the Great War but remember too that years earlier he was the Home Secretary who signed the "gross indecency" arrest warrant against Oscar Wilde, so it's lovely, isn't it, that his youngest son should be gay and best known for directing Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Earnest. After graduating from Oxford, Anthony went to Hollywood not to struggle but to live in high style as a houseguest of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. for six months. Of course he met everyone, returned to London, and within a few years directed his first feature, a romance called Shooting Stars set among actors at a movie studio. Scholars today consider it almost equal to Hitchcock's famed silent Blackmail, and it was a success at the time too, launching a career that would span forty films, including three Shaw adaptations and ten collaborations with Terence Rattigan, among them French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, and The Browning Version. Asquith was at ease in many genres--war movies, comedies, costume dramas, thrillers--and directed actors as diverse as Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Closeted but not shrinking, he was widely believed to be the man in the mask at the orgy in the Profumo affair. That person's "theatrical display of masochism" crystallized the public's notion of the Empire in decay and a government run by degenerates...basically, the gross indecency trial of its day. He remained president of the film technicians union from 1937 to his death from cancer in 1968. The British Academy Award for best music is named in his honor.