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Norman Spencer, David Lean’s collaborator and UK’s second oldest man, dies aged 110
The producer, screenwriter, production designer and actor worked on some of the most acclaimed films of British cinema including Blithe Spirit, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia
Photograph: The British Entertainment History ProjectHe also served as assistant producer on Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, as well as producing 1971 car chase classic Vanishing Point and Richard Attenborough’s apartheid drama Cry Freedom (1987), starring Denzel Washington. Two years later, alongside Lean, Noël Coward, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and film-maker Ronald Neame, he launched Cineguild Productions, responsible for many of the classic British films of the immediate postwar period. For Lawrence of Arabia, Spencer was tasked with liaising with Moroccan royalty including King Hassan II, as well as wrangling 800 camels and riders and 600 other men to play the foot soldiers in the epic battle scenes.
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