Name Stuart Legg Spouse Margaret Amos | Role Film-maker | |
Died July 23, 1988, Wiltshire, United Kingdom Movies Churchill's Island, Warclouds in the Pacific Books The Heartland, The Barbarians of Asia, Aspects of Film Series Similar People Benjamin Britten, W H Auden, Bert Haanstra, Gillian Greene, Lorne Greene | ||
DON WES 1959
Stuart Legg (31 August 1910, London, England – 23 July 1988, Wiltshire, England) was a documentary film-maker.
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As part of the British Documentary Film Movement, he worked with the GPO Film Unit from 1933, before replacing Paul Rotha as head of Strand Films in 1937. In 1939, he moved to Canada with John Grierson, where he launched the National Film Board of Canada's Canada Carries On and World in Action film series, for which he made many films. His films include Churchill's Island (1941), which won the first Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, and Warclouds in the Pacific, which was nominated for the same award. A few years after the war, he returned to Britain and worked as a producer for the Crown Film Unit between 1948 and 1950. In 1957, he became chairman of the Film Centre International. He later produced documentaries for Shell.
His interest in history led him to write The Heartland (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970; later reissued as The Barbarians of Asia); dedicated to Grierson, the book "gives the grand sweep of European and Asian history in terms of the continual conflict between the great coastal civilizations (China, India, Persia, the Middle East, Europe) and the barbarian horsemen from the central Asian steppes (Huns, Turks, Mongols, and others)."
Stuart Legg married Margaret Amos (1910–2002), daughter of Sir Percy Maurice Amos KBE KC (of the prominent Amos legal dynasty). However, they lived apart for many years.