Norman Spencer, the British producer, production manager and screenwriter who collaborated frequently with director David Lean in the 1940s and 1950s, has died. He was 110.
The “Vanishing Point” producer died on August 16 in Wimbledon, three days after his birthday, the European Organisation of Supercentenarians reported.
Spencer worked with Lean on such films as “Blithe Spirit,” “Great Expectations,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” Along with his fellow Briton, he was an assistant producer on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Southern Gothic crime thriller “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, and co-produced Richard Attenborough’s apartheid drama “Cry Freedom” (1987), starring Denzel Washington.
Norman Leslie Spencer was born in London on 13 August 1914 and grew up in Essex. He began his career in the film industry in the mid-1930s working as an extra and as a gofer at Denham Film Studios, where he met Lean, an editor, in 1942.
“We became very fond of each other, we were both crazy about movies and we started going to the movies together with our wives,” Spencer said in a 1999 interview with The British Entertainment History Project.
“We started making movies together,” he added, “and when we finished one, we always wanted to make another one right away. We would go through bookstores and he would say, ‘There’s a wonderful idea for a movie less than ten feet away from us. ’”
Spencer's big break came with Lean's directorial debut, In Which We Serve (1942), on which he served as third assistant director. He also had a small role as an officer in the film.
In 1944, he founded Cineguild Productions with Lean, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, playwright Noël Coward and filmmaker Ronald Neame. He also worked for three years as executive assistant to Elmo Williams, Fox's head of European production, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943 and the couple have two children, according to IMDb.
At the time of his death, Spencer was thought to be the oldest man living in the Greater London area and the second-oldest man living in the UK overall.
