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Alexander Mackendrick (September 8, 1912 - December 22, 1993) was a Scottish American director and teacher. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and later moved to Scotland. He began making television commercials before moving into post-production editing and directing films, most notably for Ealing Studios where his films include Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955).
His films made a gradual decline after Ealing Studios closed and he returned to America to become a teacher of filmmaking. He was the cousin of the Scottish writer Roger MacDougall.
Biography
He was born on 22 December 1912 and was the only child of Francis and Martha Mackendrick, who had emigrated to the United States from Glasgow in 1911. His father was a ship builder and a civil engineer. When Mackendrick was six, his father died of influenza as a result of an pandemic that swept the world just after World War I. His mother, in desperate need of work, decided to be a dress designer. In order to pursue that decision, it was necessary for Martha MacKendrick to hand her only son over to his grandfather, who took young MacKendrick back to Scotland when he was seven years old. Mackendrick never saw or heard from his mother again.
Young Alexander Mackendrick had a very sad and lonely childhood. He attended Hillhead High School from 1919 to 1926 and then went on to spend three years at the Glasgow School of Art. In the early 1930s, MacKendrick moved to London to work as an art director for the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson. Between 1936 and 1938, Mackendrick scripted five cinema commercials. He later reflected that his work in the advertising industry was invaluable, in spite of his extreme dislike of the industry itself. In 1937 MacKendrick wrote his first film script, Midnight Menace, with his cousin and close friend, Roger MacDougall. It was later bought by Associated British.
At the start of the Second World War, Mackendrick was employed by the Minister of Information making British propaganda films. In 1942 he went to Algiers and then to Italy, working with the Psychological Warfare Division. He then shot newsreels, documentaries, made leaflets, and did radio news. In 1943, he became the director of the film unit and approved the production of the classic Rossellini film, Rome, Open City.
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