Kenneth Rive

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Kenneth Rive (born July 26, 1918 in London-Canonbury , † December 30, 2002 in Radlett , Hertfordshire ) was a British child actor in German film and after 1945 a film distributor and cinema operator in his British homeland with sporadic excursions into film production.

Live and act

As an actor

Born in Canonbury in north London, the son of the cameraman Joe Rive , who came to Germany immediately after the end of the First World War and shot numerous B-films there from 1919 to 1927, was first brought in front of the camera at the end of the year when he was in a Prussian film to embody the Crown Prince Wilhelm. There followed numerous other boy roles in entertainment productions, in which he was performed several times as "Kenny" Rive. In the winter of 1931/32 he played another high-nobility offspring with the ailing Tsarevich Aljoscha in Rasputin . Here he had Conrad Veidt as a partner. Looking back, he called himself " Freddie Bartholomew , German style" during this time . In 1935, when Nazism had long since established itself in Germany, Rive returned to his British homeland and initially had great difficulty finding more jobs in domestic film. Rive would never return in front of the camera as an actor.

As a cinema operator, film distributor and producer

The good German-speaking Londoner spent the Second World War in the intelligence service. Back in civilian life, Rive began operating a cinema. In 1952 he leased two movie theaters in downtown London, the Berkeley and the Continentale, which were to form the basis of his later art cinema chain. In the same year he traveled to Moscow and signed a contract that only allowed him to release Soviet films in theaters in the British Isles. After seeing François Truffaut's Nouvelle Vague masterpiece They Kissed and Beat him (1959), Rive developed a deep admiration for continental European art film and was responsible for ensuring that key works by Truffaut (e.g. Jules and Jim ), Ingmar Bergman (e.g. The Silence ), Éric Rohmer (e.g. My Night with Maud ), Federico Fellini (e.g. Eight and a Half ) and Vittorio De Sica (e.g. And Yet They Live ), who are the London audiences could often only see the original with subtitles, were made accessible to capital city cinema-goers, but also to those in Manchester and Birmingham with some success. He showed great skill in promoting these films; so ran z. B. Jules and Jim in one of his London cinemas for over a year. While Rive was against films that glorified violence, he saw no problem in distributing films (often of Danish or Swedish provenance from the 1960s and 1970s) with sexually revealing content.

Over the decades, Rive founded a plethora of companies such as Gala Film Distributors in 1958 and soon owned a conglomerate of distribution and production companies. When his central gala company was bought by Menahem Golan's and Yoram Globus ' Cannon , he headed the British rental business of this Hollywood giant from 1984 to 1989. During this time, Rive was responsible for ensuring that ambitious, continental European cinema art such as Claude Berris Jean Florette and Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Film About Killing was shown in British cinemas. Kenneth Rive was also early involved in the video sector. In the first half of the 1960s, he made a few half-hearted attempts as a producer of B-Pictures .

Kenneth Rive, who had also excelled in the charitable sector, was the father of two daughters and two sons.

Filmography

as an actor in Germany

as a film producer

  • 1960: During One Night
  • 1962: The Boys
  • 1963: Devil Doll
  • 1965: Curse of the Voodoo
  • 1973: The Godfather of Harlem (Black Caesar)

literature

  • 1985 Television Almanac, Editor: Richard Gertner, 30th ed. Entry: Kenneth Rive, p. 225. New York / London 1985.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in The Telegraph

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rive, Kenneth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rive, Kenny; Rieve, Kenneth (misspelled)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British child actor, film distributor and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH July 26, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH London Canonbury
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2002
Place of death Radlett , Hertfordshire , United Kingdom