Anthony Simmons

Anthony Simmons (16 December 1922 – 22 January 2016) was a British writer and film director. He was associated with, though separate from, the Free Cinema movement; he said he was greatly influenced by Humphrey Jennings and by Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie Il Grido (1957).

Simmons was born in West Ham, then in Essex, now part of the London Borough of Newham, the fourth of five children – three boys and two girls – to parents of Polish-Jewish extraction, Miriam (née Corb) and Joseph Simmons (originally Anzulowsky), from a family of market traders. He was named Isidore but adopted the forename Anthony in his teens. After attending West Ham Grammar School, Simmons gained a law degree from the London School of Economics, where his course was interrupted by wartime service.

Simmons asserted: "I wasn’t aiming to be a film director. I was a lawyer aiming to be a writer. But I felt that if I wrote films it was more immediate. It’s quicker. You haven’t got to spell out the words, you just make the image and tell the story."