BOORMAN, JOHN

born Jan. 18, 1933, Shepperton, Middlesex [now Surrey], near London, Eng. British motion-picture director who came to film via a distinguished career in radio and documentary television. Boorman began writing film criticism for British publications at 17 years of age; he later joined Television News as a film editor and then produced documentaries for Southern Television. In 1962 he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as head of the documentary film unit and had great critical success with his series of documentaries Citizen 63, describing realistically and clearly to his viewers what the British citizen in 1963 was really like as opposed to what he said he was like. In 1964 Boorman directed The Newcomers, a six-part study of a couple from Bristol that was another success. Boorman sought to capture the real spirit of the British pop artists on screen, and his first feature film, Catch Us If You Can (1965), followed the rock group the Dave Clark Five through Bristol using the cityscape as film background. His film Point Blank (1967), a classic gangster movie, was made in Los Angeles and featured the city prominently in the screenplay. Hell in the Pacific (1968) portrayed the antagonism and mutual dependence of an American and a Japanese marooned on a Pacific island during World War II. Boorman's adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance (1972) for the screen was highly successful as an adventure story and as an allegory of endurance. Boorman also entered science fiction in Zardoz (1973), the horror film in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), and the King Arthur legend in Excalibur (1981). One of his most outstanding films, a comedy of sentiment, was his semiautobiographical Hope and Glory (1987), about a home-front family in wartime Britain.