Kenneth Cooper Annakin OBE (10 August 1914 – 22 April 2009) was an English film director.

Biography

Annakin was born in and grew up in Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire where he attended the grammar school. He began his career in feature films following an early experience making documentaries. His first filmwork was in 1947 with the Rank Organisation. The following year he moved to Gainsborough Pictures to direct three films about the Huggetts, a working-class family living in suburban England these highly successful films starring Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Petula Clark and Diana Dors (amongst others). Annakin became known for a series of Walt Disney adventures, including The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953), Third Man on the Mountain (1959), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960).

He was later associated with another American producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, when he was hired to direct the British segments in The Longest Day (1962). As head of the 20th Century-Fox Studio, Zanuck endorsed Annakin's most ambitious project Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965). Annakin also directed the big-scale war film Battle of the Bulge (also 1965) for the Warner Brothers studio.

However, some of Annakin's better received films are smaller-scale comedies and dramas, including his episodes in Quartet (1948) and Trio (1950), based on Somerset Maugham's stories, Hotel Sahara (1951), Across the Bridge (1957), Crooks Anonymous (1962), The Fast Lady (1963) and The Informers (1963).

In 1979, Ken Annakin left Britain and moved to Los Angeles.

Annakin was approached in 1984 by representatives of science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to direct a two-movie cinema version of Hubbard's 1982 novel Battlefield Earth. Pre-production for the films advanced sluggishly over the following months, and the project was ultimately cancelled for various reasons early in 1986. A "star-flash" promoting the upcoming films was added to the front cover of the paperback edition of the books sold in the UK in 1984, and the US paperback and hardback versions followed suit. The notice was of course removed from all copies printed post-March 1986. Annakin's involvement with the project, while far from secret, was not made widely known outside of industry publications during the time the 80s version of the movie was a going concern. Annakin himself rarely if ever mentioned his involvement with the 'BE' movies during the years of his life that followed its shelving.

Annakin's last completed film was The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988); Genghis Khan (1992) was not completed. He died on 22 April 2009, the same day as Jack Cardiff, who had been his cinematographer on the 1979 film The Fifth Musketeer.

Despite claims that George Lucas took the name for Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars from his friend and fellow film director, Lucas denied this via his publicist following Annakin's death in 2009.

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