Bruce Robinson(I)

Such is the mythology that has sprung up around Bruce Robinson's first film, the openly autobiographicalWithnail & I (1987),that it's often hard to separate fact from fiction. But the facts appear to be these: trained as an actor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, he got off to a good early start when he was given a reasonably prominent part as Benvolio inFranco Zeffirelli'sRomeo and Juliet (1968).But despite this and other parts for the likes ofKen Russell(The Music Lovers (1971)) andFrançois Truffaut(the male lead inL'histoire d'Adèle H. (1975)), he found that acting mostly involved fruitless waiting for the phone to ring interspersed with the occasional TV commercial, while desperately trying to make ends meet. So he began writing screenplays in the mid-1970s, and was lucky enough to secure the patronage of producerDavid Puttnamwho finally produced Robinson's script about Cambodia,The Killing Fields (1984)for which he was nominated for an Oscar. But cult success was to come a couple of years later when he wrote and directedWithnail & I (1987),a film about the squalid lives of two unemployed actors that was elevated to iconic status by students all over the world and which shot newcomerRichard E. Grantto stardom. Robinson's subsequent films, the advertising satireHow to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989)and the serial-killer thrillerJennifer Eight (1992),while less memorable than his debut, both show that Robinson has more than enough intelligence and brio to make his future career worth following.