This Sporting Life

Richard Harris gives a ferociously powerful performance as a coal mining rugby player battling demons in Lindsay Anderson’s complex and gritty debut feature.

  • Director

    Lindsay Anderson

  • With

    Richard Harris, Rachel Roberts, Alan Badel, William Hartnell

  • UK 1963. 134min

  • 35mm (1 and 15 May) + Digital (23 May)

  • Certificate

    12A

Impacting with a visceral power right from its opening scene, Anderson’s debut feature marked the first film in his long collaboration with David Storey, who adapted his own novel about a rugby player whose macho brutishness masks a vulnerability and repressed yearning for his landlady. Fed by his own complicated feelings towards his star, Anderson guided Richard Harris to a performance that saw him hailed as ‘Britain’s Brando’. It’s an ’Angry Young Man’ classic.

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