David Lean

Sir David Lean CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) was an English film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor, best remembered for bringing Charles Dickens's novels to the screen with films such as Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and for his big-screen epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984).

Acclaimed and praised by directors such as Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound "Directors Top Directors" poll 2002. Lean has four films in the top eleven of the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films.

 

Description above from the Wikipedia article David Lean, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.