November 9, 1902

Our post on the British film directer Anthony Asquith (November 9, 1902, to February 20, 1968,) is sourced with the information at IMDB. Anthony Asquith was the youngest son of British Prime Minister (1908-1916), H. H. Asquith. His cinematic hits include films like Pygmalion (1938). Anthony Asquith was the half-brother of Lady Violet Bonham Carter (whose grand daughter is Helena Bonham Carter).

"Asquith was active in the British film industry from the late silent period until the mid-1960s. As a director he was highly respected by his contemporaries and had a long and successful career; by the 1960s he was one of only three British directors (the others being David Lean and Carol Reed) who were directing major international motion picture productions. However, Asquith's proclivity for adapting plays for the screen caused an erosion in his critical reputation as a filmmaker after his death. He was faulted for what was perceived as his failure to focus, ...[compared to] his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, on the cinematic. Asquith was known as an actor's director, and solicited some of the finest film performances from Britain's greatest actors, including Edith Evans and Michael Redgrave.....

"Although Asquith's first love was music, he lacked musical talent. He channeled his artistic ambitions toward the nascent motion picture, and was instrumental in the formation of the London Film Society to promote artistic appreciation of film. Asquith traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s to observe American film production techniques, and after returning to England, he became a director..."

During World War II, Anthony Asquith directed for the war effort the film Uncensored (1932). We mention this because in the drama about the Belgium resistance, there is a scene where a stage performer is unaware of the source of an audience's laughter: a cat has appeared on a piano and proceeds to groom itself.

"Asquith's most successful postwar film was, arguably, his adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). More than a half-century after it was made, Asquith's film remains the best adaptation of Wilde's work. Ironically, Asquith's father H.H., while serving as Home Secretary, ordered Wilde's arrest for his homosexual behavior. Wilde's arrest, for "indecent behavior", led to his incarceration in the Reading jail and destroyed the great playwright, personally. The Wilde incident stifled gay culture in Britain for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Another irony of the situation is that H.H.'s youngest son, Anthony, himself was gay."

The cat incident was in Uncensored because the film was based on a novel by Oscar E. Millard (1908–1990). We feel comfortable crediting it to Asquith since the latter has been quoted:  "I will only say that every work of art, even where more than one mind had gone into it's shaping, ultimately bears the imprint of a single personality."