Richard Lester (born January 19, 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American director who lives in the United Kingdom.
A piano prodigy as a child, Lester began as a musician and singer in his native Philadelphia, making many appearances on local TV. Deciding that working on the other side of the soundstage might give him more steady income, he took a job as a stagehand at Philadelphia CBS affiliate WCAU, eventually working his way up to director. After a few years he took a job for a newspaper syndicate as a roving correspondent, which allowed him to move to Europe. After drifting around the continent he landed in London, once again working as a TV director, alongside being a Jazz musician. He even briefly starred in a Variety Show, The Dick Lester Show, while also making short films and commercials (sometimes shot by Nicolas Roeg, back when Roeg was a cinematographer). His work caught the eye of Peter Sellers, who hired him to shoot short film segments for The Goon Show. One short film he co-directed along with Sellers, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, became a film festival favorite and even earned an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film nomination.
Lester moved into full-length film afterwards, doing lower budget comedies, but Goon Show fan John Lennon had seen and loved The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film and that – along with an earlier music-themed movie Lester had directed called It's Trad, Dad (1962; also known as Ring-A-Ding Rhythm!) – got him the job directing The Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, and the rest is history. The fast editing and cheeky humor Lester (along with screenwriter Alun Owen and the Beatles themselves) was able to bring out proved to be a major influence on music videos over a decade later.
After establishing his name with the Beatles via A Hard Day's Night and Help!, Lester gained a reputation for visually impressive, cinematically unorthodox films, working in a variety of genres, with several gaining Cult Classic status. His highest-profile projects later in his career were Superman II, the sequel to Superman: The Movie (which Lester controversially took over after original director Richard Donner was fired), and The Three Musketeers (1973), a popular adaptation of the novel by Alexandre Dumas. The latter spawned two sequels - The Four Musketeers (1974) and The Return of the Musketeers (1989). However, during the making of the third Musketeer movie, Roy Kinnear, an actor and close friend of Lester's who had appeared in several of his films, died, and with the exception of a concert film he made for Paul McCartney, Lester retired from directing.
In 1999, Steven Soderbergh published a book called Getting Away with It, a book length conversation between him and Lester (also including Soderbergh's diary at the time, and ruminations on his own life and career). He's also the subject of the 1994 biography The Man Who "Framed" The Beatles by Andrew Yule.
Lester is married to Deirdre Vivian Smith, and they have two children.
Works directed by Richard Lester that have their own page:
- The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959)
- A Hard Day's Night (1964)
- The Knack... and How to Get It (1965)
- Help! (1965)
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)
- Petulia (1968)
- The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
- The Three Musketeers (1973)
- The Four Musketeers (1974)
- The Return of the Musketeers (1989)
- Juggernaut (1974)
- The Ritz (1976)
- Robin and Marian (1976)
- Superman II (1980)
- Superman III (1983)
