February 20: Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh, the director of Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies, Happy Go Lucky, Naked, and Another Year, among other films, was born on this date in 1943 in Welwyn, Great Britain into a Jewish immigrant family. Known for creating his film scripts through a process of improvisation with his actors, Leigh describes his style as “a journey of discovery as to what the film is,” which he compares to the “spirit of Talmudic study. . . . I’m inviting you, my audience, to sit round the table and for us to say: ‘Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that. We don’t know.’” His 2005 play, Two Thousand Years, was his first work with explicitly Jewish themes — secular Jewish parents appalled at the religious turn of their son (“It’s like having a Muslim in the house”), the rightward turn of Israeli politics, the anti-Israel turn of the left. In October, 2010, Leigh canceled a cultural trip to Israel in protest of the Israeli cabinet’s approval of a loyalty-oath bill that would compel non-Jewish applicants for Israeli citizenship to pledge allegiance to the country as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Leigh has been nominated for seven Academy Awards.

“[The films] are comic and tragic, there’s always two sides to a thing . . . In that sense there’s a Jewish spirit in my work.”
—Mike Leigh