Working his way up from clapper-boy to editor's apprentice in the 1930s, Lean edited newsreels and then features. His first outing as a director, with Noel Coward, "In Which We Serve" (1942), was a moving study of wartime England that contrasted the duty to fight with the human sacrifice required to win. Lean's next three films came from Coward's pen: "This Happy Breed" (1944), the story of a London family from 1919 to 1939; the rousingly entertaining "Blithe Spirit" (1945); and the quietly effective "Brief Encounter" (1945), about a bored housewife (Celia Johnson) who almost has an affair with a doctor (Trevor Howard). These were followed by faithful adaptations of "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948), justly regarded as exemplary translations of Dickens to the screen.

Of his next three films, the semi-documentary "The Sound Barrier" (1952), where he returned to the duty/sacrifice thematics of "In Which We Serve", is most noteworthy. Lean's rollicking version of the stage comedy "Hobson's Choice" (1954), the story of a woman's emancipation from her overbearing father, featured the first in a series of strong, independent women characters that would include Lara in "Dr. Zhivago" (1965), Rosy Ryan in "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) and Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore in "A Passage to India" (1984). "Summertime" (1955), about the Venice affair of a lonely American spinster (Katharine Hepburn), also reprised one of Lean's central themes, the journey as a quest for self-knowledge.

Accordingly, the WWII adventure "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) revolves around the self-delusion of Col. Jock Nicholson (Alec Guinness), leader of the British contingent in a Burmese prisoner-of-war camp. Commercially and critically successful, winning seven Academy Awards including best picture and best director, "Bridge" initiated the cycle of big-budget spectacles that would characterize Lean's later work. Increasingly jaundiced about British assumptions about power in the world, in "Bridge" Lean viewed militarism as an insane but inevitable extension of the strutting male ego, and in "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) he investigated the psychology of heroism. Starting with a dashing, if eccentric and enigmatic hero (stunningly played by Peter O'Toole), the film gradually peels away his bravado to reveal the confusion beneath.

Lean's next two films, also scripted by Robert Bolt, were love stories. The international success of the lush "Dr. Zhivago", based on the Boris Pasternak novel, may have encouraged him to accentuate his romantic tendency, which he did with disastrous results in "Ryan's Daughter". Partly due to the poor reception of this film, it would be 14 years before Lean would complete his next picture, a splendid adaptation of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India". Returning to the motif of the journey of self-discovery, reiterating the clumsy damage done by British incursion into the third world, and sharpening the ambiguities of the source novel, Lean succeeded in restoring the romantic/realist tension which had informed his best work.

At its best, Lean's is an elegant style that questions elegance. He is the English benchmark of cinematic technique that mirrors the contradictions of character and society: "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a wide-screen anti-war statement; "A Passage to India" is a sumptuously photographed critique of colonialism; and "Lawrence of Arabia" is a perfectly made chronicle of human imperfection.