- Born
- Died
- Birth nameFrank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings
- Humphrey Jennings, born in 1907, was a writer, set designer, painter, editor and, perhaps most famously, a director of ground-breaking documentary films for the renowned GPO film unit: Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary for Timothy (1945), films that changed the face of public service broadcasting. Throughout his life Jennings also worked on his great anthology on the Industrial Revolution and the human imagination, "Pandaemonium". Jennings died while making a film in Greece in 1950; Pandaemonium, a monumental achievement, was finally published in 1985.
- IMDb mini biography by: Kevin Jackson
- SpouseCicely Cooper(October 19, 1929 - September 24, 1950) (his death, 2 children)
- Children
- Died falling off a cliff while scouting locations for a film.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 508-513. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
- Graduated with a starred First in English from Pembroke College, Cambridge.
- Director Lindsay Anderson described him thus: "The only true poet of the English cinema.".
- Was also a painter. In the 1930s he was associated with the British Surrealist movement. His youngest daughter, Charlotte, went on to become an abstract artist.
- I have found people extra helpful and extra charming in war time. They are living in a more heightened existence and are much more prepared to open their arms and fall into someone else's. To that extent ... they are better film material, and the emotion that they themselves are feeling is part of the emotion that we indeed are always attempting to use and propagate about life.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content
