Penelope Houston (film critic)
Penelope Houston (born September 9, 1927 in South Kensington , London , † October 26, 2015 ) was a British film critic , journalist and writer . From 1956 to 1990 she was editor-in-chief of the British film magazine Sight & Sound .
Life
Penelope Houston was born in 1927, the elder of two children to Duncan McNeill Houston and Eilean Houston (nee Marlowe). Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Marlowe, was editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail from 1899 to 1922 .
She attended Wimbledon High School and later received a scholarship to the Roedean School . She then studied history at Somerville College of the University of Oxford . At university she wrote her first film reviews for the student magazine Isis . During this time she also met the later director Lindsay Anderson . Together with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz, he founded the film magazine Sequence in 1947 , and Houston was also involved in the first issues. After completing her studies in 1949, she first worked on a research team at a government organization in Whitehall . Her former fellow student Gavin Lambert, who switched to Sight & Sound in 1949 , brought her to his team a year later as Assistant Editor. When Lambert turned increasingly to screenwriting and moved to Hollywood in 1956 , Houston took over the position of editor-in-chief.
From 1962 Houston established the 10-year survey of the best films of all time , carried out by Sight & Sound , which had previously only been carried out once in 1952. It has since been considered one of the most important film leaderboards.
In addition, she also wrote a regular contributor to the Monthly Bulletin film of the British Film Institute and wrote film reviews for the Guardian and other British newspapers. In 1963 her first book, The Contemporary Cinema, was published .
After almost 35 years, she handed the position of editor-in-chief to Philip Dodd in 1990 and largely withdrew into private life. In 1991 she received the special prize of the London Critics' Circle Film Award . The following year she wrote a book on Alberto Cavalcanti's propaganda film Went the Day Well? As part of the BFI Film Classics series . . In 1994, Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives was a history of film archives . Occasionally she still contributed to publications such as The Times and the Spectator .
Houston had already decided in her youth never to get married. She lived in their house at Wimbledon until her parents' death in the 1980s and then settled in Putney in London . Up until old age she devoted herself to her two hobbies, betting on horse races and playing golf . She died in 2015 at the age of 88, leaving behind a brother and a nephew.
Fonts
- Contemporary Cinema . Penguin Books Ltd, 1969, ISBN 978-0140206364
- Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives. BFI Publishing, 1994, ISBN 978-0851704715
- Went the Day Well? from the BFI Film Classics series . BFI Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1844575008
Web links
- In memoriam Penelope Houston at the British Film Institute
- Penelope Houston in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Penelope Houston obituary at theguardian.com, accessed March 29, 2016
- ↑ a b c d e Penelope Houston, editor-obituary at telegraph.co.uk, accessed March 29, 2016
- ↑ Voting for the Sight & Sound poll ... in 1962 at bfi.org.uk, accessed on March 29, 2016
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Houston, Penelope |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British film critic, journalist and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 9, 1927 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | South Kensington , London |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 26, 2015 |