During the middle years of the 1960s, director Richard Lester captured the spirit of his times with an energy and vitality unmatched by any of his contemporaries; a peerless and highly sophisticated visual humorist, his films -- particularly those in conjunction with the Beatles -- brilliantly tapped the essence of the fledgling youth movement, and remain definitive portraits of their era. Lester was born January 19, 1932, in Philadelphia, PA. After graduating high school at the precocious age of 15, he studied clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, but his central focus became music and the theater, and after graduating in 1951, he went to work as a stagehand at Philadelphia television station WCAU. Over the next few years Lester rose through the station's ranks to become a director, helming over a dozen live broadcasts -- news reports, sporting events, dramas, even puppet shows -- each week; he subsequently quit the position to move to Europe, earning money as a roving correspondent for small town newspapers and supplementing his income by playing jazz piano in coffee bars.
In 1955, Lester landed in London, where he attempted to shop Curtains for Harry, a musical comedy he had written and composed; later produced for British television, the piece was largely deemed a failure, but it brought Lester to the attention of the country's fledgling television industry, where his eclectic resumé made him highly desirable to executives. Beginning in 1956, he directed Downbeat, the first jazz series on commercial television; that same year he also mounted The Dick Lester Show, a surreal comedy-variety program modeled after the legendary radio series the Goon Show. While Lester's own program was axed after only one episode, it so impressed Goon Show alum Peter Sellers that he reformed the troupe for a series of specials, which he then tapped Lester to direct. After helming such Goon Show efforts as 1956's A Show Called Fred and Idiot's Weekly, Lester next turned to the detective series Mark Sabre, sharing directorial chores with Joseph Losey; in 1958, while on honeymoon, he also worked briefly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
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