Famous People with Dyslexia: Legendary Filmmaker David Lean

"I'm not a word man, I'm a picture man." - David Lean, filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, and editor of Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India, and Ryan's Daughter.

From David Lean: A Biography: "David was sent to kindergarten...here it became apparent that brilliant families do not always produce brilliant children. By the standrads of the time, with their ruthless emphasis on the three Rs, David was dim. By comparison with his brother, who was still only four, he was alarmingly backward.

'I remember my mother coming back one afternoon from a visit to Miss Clayton. She said, 'Dave, Miss Clayton has told me a terrible thing about you. She's afraid you will never be able to read or write.' And she burst into tears...The kindest theory was that perhaps the boy had some brain disease...(his father) decided that the boy was being sluggish on purpose and began to bully him. As for David, he often sat glumly and silently - David Lean's silences would later become legendary in the film industry."

More from Lean's childhood: "David did not enjoy the pursuits he was expected to enjoy. Reading was an effort and he avoided it as much as he could...Boys of low academic ability were forgiven if they shone at sport, but David wasn't much good at this either...He would spend longer and longer gazing into space, actually deep in thought, but to his father, merely confirming his worst suspicions..."

Lean's family history was also a fairly common one for dyslexia - his father was an accountant, and his mother's family was "very artistic with a lot of gift in them. The Tangyes were artists, inventors and engineers."

Lean reminisced, "Horses and trams were an important part of my childhood; the clop-clop-cloop of horses' hooves on cobbles and the noise of tram bells and the tram wheels on the tracks...I can see the cart wheels, bright silver from friction, the metal lining in place of a tire, gleaming, highly polished silver, like a railway line...the exciting flash and crackle as the arm travelled along the wire - I used that in Doctor Zhivago!" One wonders whether today Lean whether someone would have been tempted to diagnose him with Aspergers..

Lean exemplifies many of the common talents seen in gifted dyslexics - strong visual thinking and storytelling, powerful personal memory and an ability to "get into the heads' of others.

More Lean: "I think slowly, and there is nothing unusual about my methods. I envy people who receive sudden flashes of genius, because I don't. I try to work out every possible way to do a scene, and then choose the way that will surprise audiences. I live with my scripts, I live with my characters, and if I seem to be in another world when friends and unit people speak to me, it's because I don't have the scene solved yet. I'm frequently thought to be rude when I'm really in a mental turmoil, struggling with some problem that seems insuperable at the moment."

In the video below watch some Steven Spielberg talk about David Lean and the making of Lawrence of Arabia (there are some great clips selected in the short video), but better yet, take time and watch all of Lean's greatests. We also loved Great Expectations.

For more stories and videos about famous dyslexics, visit Dyslexic Advantage

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