On January 14, 1896, at England's Royal Photographic Society, American-born photographer and inventor Birt Acres held a public screening of motion pictures he'd made in 1895, using a camera he'd designed with Robert William Paul (based on the Edison Kinetoscope); Acres' films included Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race and Rough Sea At Dover. The next month, Frenchman Félicen Trewey, the Lumière Brothers' London representative, gave England's first film program to charge admission, with short documentaries and glimpses of music-hall performers. Later that year, Acres made comedies and a drama, The Arrest Of A Pickpocket, but by 1900 returned to inventing. Paul kept with film until 1910, mostly producing trick-photography shorts like those of Georges Méliès, such as The Twins' Tea Party (1897). In 1899 he built England's first indoor film studio and made such imaginative fantasies as Voyage To The Arctic (1903) and The ? Motorist (1906). George Albert Smith, who also produced Méliès-style comedies, used innovations such as close-ups, in Grandma's Reading Glass (1900), and color: He patented the Kinemacolor process with American-born Charles Urban in 1906, which was used in his Kinemacolor Puzzle (1909) and Urban's The Durbar At Delhi (1911).

In the early 1900s, Scottish-born producer/director James Williamson made accomplished dramas such as Attack On A Chinese Mission Station (1900) and Fire (1902). Music-hall comic Alf Collins became a skilled director in the editing and camerawork of such films as The Pickpocket (1903). Cecil Hepworth, a former assistant to Acres, produced the polished and highly popular Rescued By Rover (1905, directed by Lewin Fitzhamon), in which he starred with his family (and their dog!). William George Barker produced England's first two-reeler in 1911: Henry VIII, directed by Louis N. Parker, with stage actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Scottish director Arthur Vivian followed with a three-reel Rob Roy. In 1912 Hepworth produced the four-reel Oliver Twist, directed by Thomas Bentley, and Wilfred Loy directed the five-reel Lorna Doone; the next year, Barker produced a six-reel East Lynne, and Hepworth and Bentley their eight-reel David Copperfield.

Despite these advances, British film was already in trouble. By 1910, Europe and Hollywood dominated the market, with domestic productions comprising only 15 percent of the films shown in England. The war further hurt the industry, despite such notable productions as the first Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study In Scarlet (1914), and the Feuillade-style serial Ultus -- The Man From The Dead (1916), both directed by George Pearson. After the war Pearson made a star of teenage Betty Balfour, whom he introduced in the hit sentimental comedies Nothing Else Matters (1920) and Squibs (1921); they continued to work together in the 1920s. Hepworth, however, had his last successes with such films as Alf's Button (1920) and Comin' Thro' The Rye (1922). Michael Balcon became a producer with the international hit Woman To Woman (1923), directed by Graham Cutts and starring Hollywood's Betty Compson; Cutts later scored directing stage star Ivor Novello in Balcon's The Rat (1925) and The Triumph Of The Rat (1926). Balcon also launched the career of Cutts' assistant, who would become one of England's greatest filmmakers: Alfred Hitchcock. However, only their third collaboration, the Jack The Ripper thriller The Lodger (1926, also with Novello), looked ahead to the style and shocks of Hitchcock's talkies. Producer/director Herbert Wilcox had hits with Nell Gwynn (1926), starring Dorothy Gish, and Dawn (1928) with Sybil Thorndike. Yet by 1926 a mere five percent of films shown in England were British-made. The government set a quota system that forced theaters to exhibit an increasing amount of British films. The jumpstart afforded by this legislation, however, worked against the industry in the 1930s, when cheap and uninspired "quota quickies" filled British cinemas -- and emptied them.

Hitchcock directed the first British talkie, Blackmail (1929), and used sound creatively; also impressive were his whodunit Murder (1930) and his provocative black comedy Rich And Strange (1932). Anthony Asquith, who'd been co-writer and associate director on the stylish movie-industry comedy/drama Shooting Stars (1928), used sound well in his first talkies, the romantic-triangle drama A Cottage On Dartmoor (1930) and the war film Tell England (1931, co-directed with Geoffrey Barkas). Most early sound films, however, brought little imagination to the technology. Hungarian producer/director Alexander Korda, who came to England in 1932, made several quota quickies before scoring an international hit with the lavish biopic The Private Life Of Henry VIII (1933) starring Charles Laughton. Korda produced several major films in the '30s, including The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard; Sanders Of The River (1935), directed by his brother Zoltán; and the H.G. Wells adaptation Things To Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies. Korda also directed Laughton in their classic biopic Rembrandt (1936). Michael Balcon produced many beloved films in these years, including the Jessie Matthews musicals Evergreen (1934) and First A Girl (1935) with director Victor Saville; Robert Flaherty's classic documentary Man Of Aran (1934); the Boris Karloff horror tales The Ghoul (1933) and The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936); and Will Hay's 1936 comedies Where There's A Will and Windbag The Sailor, both directed by William Beaudine. Balcon also produced four of Hitchcock's classic spy films: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), and Sabotage (1936). Hitchcock went on to direct the thriller Young And Innocent (1937), the brilliant spy mystery The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Jamaica Inn (1939) with Laugton before leaving to work in Hollywood.

The end of the decade saw the release of Asquith's Shaw adaptation Pygmalion (1938), Zoltán Korda's rousing adventure tale The Four Feathers (1939), and the A.J. Cronin adaptation The Stars Look Down (1939), directed by Carol Reed. But the industry was collapsing under its crush of profitless quota quickies, and began to cut back on production. With the start of World War Two, all film resources went to the war effort. Michael Powell, who'd made the realistic adventure tale The Edge of The World (1937), directed the Nazi-espionage drama The Spy In Black (1939, aka U-Boat 29). Producer Alexander Korda brought in Powell on both The Lion Has Wings (1939, co-directed with Brian Desmond Hurst and Adrian Brunel), a morale-booster of British air power, and the classic fantasy The Thief Of Bagdad (1940, co-directed with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan). With writer Emeric Pressburger, Powell made the behind-enemy-lines dramas 49th Parallel (1941) and One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942); together they produced, wrote, and directed a controversial tale of a British officer's long career, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943). David Lean went from editor to director, sharing the helming tasks with Noel Coward, who was also writer, producer, and star of In Which We Serve (1942), a classic hymn to the British navy. Other notable wartime films include the semi-documentary Next Of Kin (1942), directed by Thorold Dickinson; Balcon's production of Nazis commandos in England, Went The Day Well? (1942), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; The First Of The Few (1942), about the maker of the Spitfire plane, and the last film of actor/director Leslie Howard; Asquith's airfield-personnel drama The Way To The Stars (1945); and two looks at civilian life, Millions Like Us (1943), written and directed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and The Way Ahead (1944), directed by Carol Reed. Equally patriotic in spirit was actor/director Laurence Olivier's stirring Henry V (1944). Respite from the war came in the Shaw adaptation Major Barbara (1941), directed by Gabriel Pascal; Powell and Pressburger's pilgrimage drama A Canterbury Tale (1944) and their romantic tale I Know Where I'm Going (1945); David Lean's films of the Noel Coward plays This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Brief Encounter (1945); and Balcon's classic horror anthology Dead Of Night (1945).

After the war, Powell and Pressburger created three of the best loved of all British films: the fantasy/drama A Matter Of Life And Death (1946, aka Stairway To Heaven), with its trial held in heaven; the stylish convent psychodrama Black Narcissus (1947); and the landmark ballet film The Red Shoes (1948) with Moira Shearer. David Lean outdid himself with two classic adaptations of Dickens, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), both starring Alec Guinness. Carol Reed, now a producer/director, made the films that are the basis of his reputation: the classic tale of a fugitive Irish rebel, Odd Man Out (1947) with James Mason; the Graham Greene adaptation The Fallen Idol (1948) with Ralph Richardson; and a black-market thriller set in postwar Vienna, The Third Man (1949), scripted by Greene and starring Orson Welles. Olivier had another hit with the Bard, starring in and directing Hamlet (1948). Balcon's best productions included the comedy Whiskey Galore! (1949, aka Tight Little Island), directed by Alexander Mackendrick, in which Scottish islanders scramble to salvage whiskey from a sinking ship, and two films directed by Robert Hamer: the escaped-convict drama It Always Rains On Sunday (1947) and the black comedy Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949), with Alec Guinness playing eight different family members/victims.

Balcon's last major films of the 1950s were his comedies with Guinness: Charles Crichton directed the caper satire The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and Mackendrick helmed both The Man In The White Suit (1951), in which Guinness causes an industry panic by inventing a suit that won't deteriorate, and The Ladykillers (1955), with Guinness leading a pack of inept murderers who can't dispose of one little old lady. Powell and Pressburger's work became more erratic, but boasted such important titles as The Tales Of Hoffman (1951), a production of Offenbach's opera, and their last two collaborations, the war actioners The Battle Of The River Plate (1956, aka Pursuit Of The Graf Spee) and Ill Met By Moonlight (1957, aka Night Ambush). David Lean continued making major works: The Sound Barrier (1952, aka Breaking The Sound Barrier), an account of the invention of jet planes, written by Terence Rattigan; the sly 1890s comedy Hobson's Choice (1954) with Charles Laughton; Summer Madness (1955, aka Summertime), written by Lean and H.E. Bates, with Katharine Hepburn as a spinster who falls in love with a married man while vacationing in Venice; and the international box-office smash The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), with Alec Guinness as the British POW who leads his men to build a bridge for their hated Japanese captors.

The 1950s saw the release of several other major British films. The terrorist thriller Seven Days To Noon (1950) and the labor-union satire I'm All Right, Jack (1959) with Peter Sellers, were both directed by John Boulting and produced by his twin brother Ray. The Horse's Mouth (1958) featured Guinness's classic portrayal of an eccentric artist. Actor/director Laurence Olivier adapted Shakespeare's Richard III (1955) and co-starred with Marilyn Monroe in the comedy The Prince And The Showgirl (1957), written by Terence Rattigan. Carol Reed directed the Joseph Conrad adaptation Outcast Of The Islands (1951) and The Man Between (1953), set in postwar Berlin. The Rattigan plays The Winslow Boy (1950) and The Browning Version (1951) were filmed by Anthony Asquith, who also helmed Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest (1952). A Night To Remember (1958) was a powerful account of the sinking of the Titanic, directed by Roy Ward Baker. Two important directors who debuted in the '50s were Peter Brook, with The Beggar's Opera (1953), a production of the John Gay opera, and Jack Clayton, whose Room At The Top (1958), looked at the corporate mentality in England.

Several long-running comedy series also started in the 1950s. Frank Launder wrote, produced, and directed the school satire The Happiest Days Of Your Life (1950), initiating his wild "St. Trinian's" series -- highlighted by The Belles Of St. Trinian's (1954) -- with Alastair Sim in drag as the headmistress of a school filled with devilish girls. The medical-school comedy Doctor In The House (1954), directed by Ralph Thomas, put six more "Doctor"s into practice over the next ten years, played mostly by Dirk Bogarde. Thomas's brother Gerald directed the low-budget and lowbrow Carry On Sergeant (1958) and launched a series of broad "Carry On" comedies for the next 20 years. Turning to a different genre, Hammer Films became the most succesful film studio in British history with inexpensive but slick horror films, starting with The Curse Of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror Of Dracula (1958), directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Michael Powell turned to horror in 1960 with the serial-killer shocker Peeping Tom. Today considered a classic, the film was a financial and critical flop. Powell worked only sporadically thereafter, and although Pressburger scripted his They're A Weird Mob (1966) and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972), the old magic didn't reignite. Carol Reed, working increasingly in the United States, also failed to recapture his earlier success, despite the acclaim given his film of the musical Oliver! (1968). Anthony Asquith, again with Rattigan, had his last hurrah with the multi-episode drama The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964). David Lean, now working with writer Robert Bolt, stuck to exotic epics. He completed only two films in the '60s, but they were huge financial successes as well as two of Lean's best: Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), a biopic of T.E. Lawrence, which made a star of Peter O'Toole, and Doctor Zhivago (1965), a romantic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel of the Russian revolution. Peter Brook made his best-known films: Lord Of The Flies (1963), an adaptation of William Golding's allegory in which a group of boys on a desert island revert to savagery, and Marat/Sade (1967), from the play by Peter Weiss, with the Marquis de Sade critiquing post-Revolutionary France (and comtemporary Europe) by staging a play in the insane asylum which is also his prison. Jack Clayton directed The Innocents (1961), a chilling adaptation of Henry James's "The Turn Of The Screw," and Our Mother's House (1967) with Dirk Bogarde, a touching and disturbing tale of children living on their own after the death of their parents. American-born director Joseph Losey, blacklisted during the McCarthy era, settled in England in the mid 1950s; with writer Harold Pinter, he made the films for which he is best known: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971), all scathing assaults on the upper class. American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick settled in England in 1961 and made three of his best films: the Nabokov adaptation Lolita (1962) with James Mason and Peter Sellers; the doomsday satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), also with Sellers; and the science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). British-born John Boorman made his mark with the American films Point Blank (1967) and Hell In The Pacific (1968), both starring Lee Marvin, and the hit James Dickey adaptation Deliverance (1972). As a writer/director of British films, his career includes the science-fictioner Zardoz (1974); the stylish Arthurian saga Excalibur (1981); a memorable autobiographical comedy of England during the Blitz, Hope And Glory (1987); and the crime drama The General (1998).

The British theater's trend of realism and social commentary in the late '50s emerged in cinema with director Tony Richardson's first features, Look Back In Anger (1959) with Richard Burton and The Entertainer (1960) with Laurence Olivier, both from plays by John Osborne. Richardson also made two strong looks at lower-class British life, A Taste Of Honey (1961) from the Shelagh Delaney play, and The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962), a reform-school drama by writer Alan Sillitoe. His first international hit was the landmark bawdy comedy Tom Jones (1963), from Henry Fielding's novel, which made a star of Albert Finney. Richardson's other '60s films include the striking psychodrama Mademoiselle (1966) with Jeanne Moreau, written by Jean Genet, and a blistering look at military incompetence, The Charge Of The Light Brigade (1968). Other directors also worked in the same theater-inspired "Angry Young Man" vein before progressing to different types of stories. Karl Reisz made the working-class drama Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960) as well as the hip black comedy Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966) and the Isadora Duncan biopic Isadora (1968, aka The Loves Of Isadora). John Schlesinger debuted with A Kind Of Loving (1962), an unexpected-pregnancy drama, and Billy Liar (1963), a comic look at a young man who lives in a fantasy world; he followed with an acclaimed look at upper-class emptiness, Darling (1965), and an adaptation of Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd (1967), both with Julie Christie. Lindsay Anderson's first feature was This Sporting Life (1963), a brutal look at a rugby player, written by David Storey; he later scored with If ... (1968) a black comedy of a boys-school uprising. Ken Loach kept the faith, and starting with Poor Cow (1967) has made realistic political films of the disenfranchised, often with non-professional actors: Kes (1969), Days Of Hope (1976), Looks And Smiles (1981), Raining Stones (1993), My Name Is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002). Writer/director Mike Leigh also shares this sensibility, with such striking working-class dramas as High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets And Lies (1996), and All Or Nothing (2002); a celebrated departure for Leigh was his stylish look at Gilbert & Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy (1999).

In 1960, actor-turned-writer Bryan Forbes scripted the caper film The League Of Gentlemen, directed by Basil Dearden, and the labor drama The Angry Silence, directed by Guy Green. Actor Richard Attenborough was featured in both, and with Attenborough producing, Forbes debuted as a director with Whistle Down The Wind (1961), in which three children shelter a criminal whom they think is Jesus Christ. Forbes followed by writing and directing the boarding-house drama The L-Shaped Room (1962); the kidnaping thriller Seance On A Wet Afternoon (1964), starring Attenborough and Kim Stanley; the Japanese POW drama King Rat (1965); and an offbeat drama of old age, The Whisperers (1967) with Edith Evans. American-born Richard Lester began directing films in England with the zany short The Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film (1960), starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan from television's "The Goon Show." Lester followed with three funny and fast-paced rock musicals that defined swinging London of the '60s: It's Trad, Dad! (1962, aka Ring-A-Ding Rhythm), his first feature, and two landmark films with the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965). Lester's other important '60s work includes the farce The Knack ... And How To Get It (1965), the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1966), the antiwar satire How I Won The War (1967) with John Lennon, the comedy/drama Petulia (1968), and the post-World War Three comedy The Bed Sitting Room (1969).

The most original and controversial of the 1960s' filmmakers was Ken Russell. His first features, the modest farce French Dressing (1963) and the spy thriller Billion Dollar Brain (1967), only hinted at what was to come; his television biopics, however -- on Isadora Duncan (Isadora: The Biggest Dancer In The World, 1966), Dante Rossetti (Dante's Inferno, 1967), Frederick Delius (Song Of Summer, 1968), and Richard Strauss (Dance Of The Seven Veils, 1970) -- were pure Russell, offering provocative blends of nature painting, hallucinatory fantasy, and black comedy. His breakthrough feature, the erotic D.H. Lawrence adaptation Women In Love (1969), made stars of both Russell and actress Glenda Jackson, and he began making his most extreme and memorable films: The Music Lovers (1970), a Tchaikovsky biopic Russell called "a story about a homosexual who fell in love with a nymphomaniac," starring Jackson and Richard Chamberlain; The Devils (1971), a phantasmagoria of possession and religious madness in 17th-century France; the charming Busby Berkeley-style musical The Boy Friend (1971); biopics of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (Savage Messiah, 1972) and the great postromantic composer Gustav Mahler (Mahler, 1974); a dazzling rock opera of The Who's Tommy (1975), starring Roger Daltrey and Ann-Margret; the anti-Wagner diatribe Lisztomania (1975) with Daltrey as Franz Liszt; and Valentino (1977), a biopic of the silent-screen legend, starring Rudolf Nureyev.

Derek Jarman, who'd designed the bizarre sets for The Devils, began making his own features in the '70s: a homoerotic drama of St. Sebastian, Sebastiane (1976), with the dialogue in subtitled Latin; the classic vision of punk England, Jubilee (1978); and a stylish Shakespeare adaptation, The Tempest (1979). Actor Richard Attenborough began directing with the surreal antiwar musical Oh! What A Lovely War (1969), and had box-office hits with his war epics Young Winston (1972) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg became a director with Performance (1970), a psychodrama of rockers and gangsters, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, which he co-directed with scriptwriter Donald Cammell. Roeg followed with the Australian outback drama Walkabout (1971), the scary and erotic thriller Don't Look Now (1973), and the unusual science-fictioner The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), written by Paul Mayersburg and starring David Bowie. Alan Parker debuted with Bugsy Malone (1976), a musical gangster spoof with an all-child cast. His career has since alternated between the U.S. and the U.K.; his British films include the rock musicals Pink Floyd -- The Wall (1982) and The Commitments (1991), and Angela's Ashes (1999), an adaptation of Frank McCourt's bleak childhood memoir. The writers and stars of the television comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" -- Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin -- began making films with And Now For Something Completely Different (1972), which re-created their best TV routines. Their original follow-ups are some of the funniest films ever made: the Arthurian send-up Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1974); a satire set in the time of Christ, The Life Of Brian (1979); and a potpourri of comic mayhem, Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life (1983).

Independent filmmaker Terence Davies made the powerful, semi-autobiographical short Children in 1976; he followed with Madonna And Child (1980) and Death And Transfiguration (1983), two more accounts of his protagonist's struggle with homosexuality, and all three are now shown collectively as The Terence Davies Trilogy. An elliptical storyteller and a poet of nostalgia and loss, Davies made Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), two feature-length journeys into autobiography, before turning to adaptations: The Neon Bible (1995) with Gena Rowlands, The House Of Mirth (2000) with Gillian Anderson. Scotland's Bill Forsyth wrote and directed That Sinking Feeling (1979), a caper spoof in which a group of kids steal some sinks from a warehouse. Gregory's Girl (1981), his delightful comedy of teen love, was a hit in the States and led to Local Hero (1983), a classic satire of Americans hunting for oil in Scotland. After Comfort And Joy (1984), a comedy of warring ice-cream makers, Forsyth made American films -- Housekeeping (1987) with Christine Lahti, Breaking In (1989), written by John Sayles, and Being Human (1994) with Robin Williams -- but only his 20-years-later sequel Gregory's Two Girls (1999) rekindled the unique quality of his earlier work. American-born director James Ivory, working with European writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Indian producer Ismail Merchant, has made numerous handsome films, including adaptations of Jean Rhys (Quartet, 1981), Jhabvala (Heat And Dust, 1983), and E.M. Forster (A Room With A View, 1986; Maurice, 1987; Howards End, 1992).

David Lean may have flopped with his overblown romantic drama Ryan's Daughter (1970), but his last film, the E.M. Forster adaptation A Passage To India (1984), lived up to his reputation. Peter Brook made the accomplished King Lear (1971) with Paul Scofield; a Gurdjieff biopic, Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979); and an epic rendition of Hindu cosmology, The Mahabharata (1990). Stanley Kubrick also kept making major films: his version of Anthony Burgess' dystopia, A Clockwork Orange (1971); a lavish Thackeray adaptation, Barry Lyndon (1975); the Stephen King horror tale The Shining (1980); a brutal look at the Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket (1987), and his swan song, a dreamlike adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Other filmmakers, however, went into decline during these years. Tony Richardson's best work was behind him, despite such films as the Edward Albee adaptation A Delicate Balance (1973) and a second Fielding comedy, Joseph Andrews (1977) with Ann-Margret and Peter Firth. Jack Clayton made the American flops The Great Gatsby (1974) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). Bryan Forbes stalled with The Raging Moon (1971), and didn't reassert himself with The Stepford Wives (1975) or International Velvet (1978). Lester had hits with The Three Musketeers (1974) and The Four Musketeers (1975), and made the beloved tale of Robin Hood's last days, Robin And Marian (1976) with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn; his later films were mostly impersonal efforts such as Superman II (1980) and Superman III (1983). After his landmark bisexual drama Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), written by Penelope Gilliat, John Schlesinger disappeared into such American genre films as The Believers (1987) and Pacific Heights (1990). Attenborough had an international smash with his epic biopic Gandhi (1982), but the musical A Chorus Line (1985) and the anti-Apartheid drama Cry Freedom (1987) were less impressive. As a director, he has kept to biopics, with varying degrees of success: Chaplin (1992), Shadowlands (1993), In Love And War (1996), Grey Owl (1999). Nicolas Roeg's later films were also erratic, but his look at American fame, Insignificance (1985), the surreal Track 29 (1988), written by Dennis Potter, and his Roald Dahl adaptation The Witches (1990) offer some of his best work. Potter, a celebrated television writer, also scripted the unsettling Brimstone And Treacle (1982); Dreamchild (1985), a look at Lewis Carroll's Alice; and Blackeyes (1990), which he also directed.

Derek Jarman continued to do outstanding and original work: his non-narrative features The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987), and The Garden (1990); the stylish biopics Caravaggio (1986) and Wittgenstein (1993); a powerful adaptation of Christopher Marlowe, Edward II (1991); and the minimalist Blue (1993), finished a few months before his death from AIDS. Russell's notable recent work includes the American films Altered States (1980) and Crimes Of Passion (1984); his reinvention of Oscar Wilde, Salome's Last Dance (1988); the horror tale The Lair Of The White Worm (1988); the Lawrence adaptations The Rainbow (1989) and Lady Chatterley (1992); and unique television films on composers Ralph Vaughn Williams, Anton Bruckner, and Sir Arnold Bax. Director Hugh Hudson struck gold with his debut about Olympic runners, Chariots Of Fire (1981), only to see his career fizzle soon after. Director Stephen Frears established himself with a touching look at race relations and gay love, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and a biopic of playwright Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears (1987). Mike Figgis wrote and directed the moody dramas Stormy Monday (1988) and Liebestraum (1991), and adapted Terrence Rattigan (The Browning Version, 1994) and August Strindberg (Miss Julie, 1999). Irish director Jim Sheridan teamed with actor Daniel Day-Lewis for the powerful dramas My Left Foot (1989), In The Name Of The Father (1993), and The Boxer (1997). The arty and erotic films of Peter Greenaway, such as The Belly Of An Architect (1987), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), The Pillow Book (1995), and 8-1/2 Women (1999), have their admirers. Irish-born director Neil Jordan has won acclaim for his dramas mixing romance and violence: the crime film Mona Lisa (1986), the terrorism tale The Crying Game (1992), Michael Collins (1996), a biopic of the Irish politician, and the psychological drama The Butcher Boy (1997). Kenneth Branagh directed himself in the Shakespeare adaptations Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), and Love's Labour's Lost (2000). Writer/director Sally Potter made Orlando (1993), an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's androgynous fantasy, starring Tilda Swinton; the autobiographical The Tango Lesson (1997); and the historical drama The Man Who Cried (2000). Director Danny Boyle teamed with writer John Hodge, producer Andrew Macdonald, and actor Ewan McGregor for a trio of dark comedies: Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting (1996), and A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Other important recent British films include writer/director Andrew Birkin's The Cement Garden (1992), adapting Ian McEwen's novel; the romantic comedy Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994), directed by Mike Newell; director Peter Cattaneo's hit comedy about unemployed steelworkers finding jobs as male strippers, The Full Monty (1997); director John Madden's historical romances, Mrs. Brown (1997) and Shakespeare In Love (1998); Little Voice (1998), writer/director Mark Herman's showcase for the singing and acting talents of Jane Horrocks; the slick crime films of writer/director Guy Ritchie, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000); and Billy Elliot (2000), director Stephen Daldry's hit comedy/drama about a young boy who yearns to be a ballet dancer. England's film industry has endured thanks to a continuous, seemingly inexhaustible pool of filmmaking talent, generation after generation -- the sun will never set on the British cinema.