The career of Charles Crichton is one of the most remarkable in British film history. Starting as an editor for Alexander Korda in the 1930s, he went on to direct several much-loved Ealing comedies, including The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt , before moving into television work in the 1960s. At the age of seventy-seven he made a sensational return to film with A Fish Called Wanda , an international box-office hit that was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. This is the first book to offer a full account of Crichton's career, which spanned most of the twentieth century and can be seen as a microcosm of the British film industry itself. It shows that, rather than being an out-and-out comedy director, Crichton was a tremendously versatile filmmaker, whose skills extended to wartime dramas and film noir . This adaptability was to serve him well when the British film industry began to falter in the 1950s, allowing him to make a smooth transition into primetime television, where he worked on such popular shows as The Avengers , Space: 1999 and The Adventures of Black Beauty . The unlikely success of A Fish Called Wanda , which Crichton co-wrote with John Cleese, brought him briefly back into the limelight, but he continued working to the end, filming corporate videos for Cleese's Video Arts company and helping to develop a screen version of Noël Coward's Hay Fever . Featuring first-hand testimony from colleagues ranging from Dame Judi Dench and Petula Clark to John Cleese and Sir Michael Palin, this riveting account of Crichton's fascinating life in film will appeal to film scholars and general readers alike.