Lindsay Anderson, the iconic British film director best known for cutting-edge works such as This Sporting Life and If…, died in France on 30 August, 1994.

Throughout his illustrious career he was known as a film critic, documentary film-maker and film and theatre director. Even though he had many strings to his creative bows, it remained his feature films that garnered him most adulation.

His films were consistently praised and he was a recipient of the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes as well as an Academy Award for documentary-making. As a proponent of hard-hitting social realism, Mr Anderson made some of the classic British films of the 1960s and '70s.

Lindsay Gordon Anderson was born in India on 17 April, 1923. His family was of Scottish descent and his father was a British Army officer. Although he spent his early years in Bangalore he was educated at Cheltenham College. This is where he met his lifelong friend and later to be his biographer, Gavin Lambert.

After leaving Cheltenham, Mr Anderson went to Oxford Wadham and Magdalen Colleges to study classics and English literature respectively. He then worked for the final year of the Second World War as part of the Intelligence Corps, stationed in Delhi.

Before he became a film-maker, Mr Anderson worked as a critic for Sequence magazine, which he founded himself with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz. He later wrote for Sight and Sound and the New Statesman. He wrote several pieces that exhaustively detailed his beliefs regarding the nature of cinema and how it should progress.

In the 1950s Mr Anderson produced several independent short films with his friends. This helped him to develop the cinematic theory that would become the Free Cinema Movement towards the end of the decade. One of the main principles of this movement was the belief that British cinema should not just be the province of the upper and middle classes but should also be made accessible to working class people.

Along with other film-makers, including Tony Richardson , Mr Anderson managed to raise enough funding to make a series of short documentaries about a variety of topics that were designed to challenge society. These films harked back to the British documentary traditions of the 1930s and can be seen as precursors to the social realism and kitchen sink dramas that came out in the 1960s, including Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

As well as being an influential film-maker, Mr Anderson was also an award-winning one. In 1954 he won an Oscar for 'Best Documentary Short'. His later feature film If…. (1968) won a Palme d'Or. This film was part of Mr Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy, all starring Malcolm McDowell, which also included O Lucky Man (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).

As well as being a talented and respected film director, Mr Anderson was also a key figure in British theatre. He forged a long running association with London's Royal Court Theatre, where he jointly held the position of artistic director in the 1970s.

Even though Mr Anderson had not made a film since 1987, his reputation had not dimmed in the slightest by the time of his death at 71. British cinema will remain forever indebted for his groundbreaking achievements.