Lean’s next film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), based on the life and military career of World War I British hero T.E. Lawrence, became the definitive dramatic film epic of its generation.

Doctor Zhivago (1965), a complex romance about life in Russia before and during the revolution, opened to mixed reviews but went on to become one of the top-grossing movies of the ‘60s, despite a three-hour running time.

With an armload of Oscars behind him from his three most recent pictures, with combined box-office earnings of as much as 300 million dollars, Lean was established as one of the top “money” directors of the decade.

But his next movie, the multimillion-dollar, 200-minute Ryan’s Daughter (1970), fared far less well, especially before the critics, who almost universally condemned the slowness and seeming self-indulgence of its drama and scale.

Disheartened by its reception, Lean took more than ten years to release his next film, the critical and box-office success A Passage to India (1984). He was working on Nostromo, based upon Joseph Conrad’s book, at the time of his death in 1991.

Lean's fascination with the effect of natural environment on character and motivation led him to the wildest parts of the globe - a restless quest that was reflected in the powerful, contradictory emotions that swayed his protagonists....

David Lean was at once the most prestigious and most mysterious British film director; he was also perhaps the least understood, having had an unenviable reputation among the most influential British and American critics.

Lean's films, especially his later ones, attracted huge audiences and won Academy Awards, yet the majority of commentators dismissed him as a brilliant technician without a personality, squandering needlessly inflated budgets on calculatedly tasteful spectacles. Rarely interviewed, Lean was widely regarded as remote and outmoded.

Lean was not a prolific director but preferred to be highly selective and to control every aspect of his productions; his perfectionist techniques were legendary, His last three films brought him much personal wealth, enabling him jealously to guard his privacy and left him free to travel extensively to research new projects.

He was an intensely likeable man, very distinguished-looking, disarmingly modest about his own achievements and generous and perceptive in his praise of other people's.