In many ways, the life of John Schlesinger (1926-2003) is also the history of movies in the United Kingdom and the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. After producing a series of short films and BBC programs during the 1950's, Schlesinger blossomed as one of four “Angry Young Men” - along with Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson - who revolutionized British cinema in the 1960's. Films like Billy Liar (1963) and Darling (1965) led to a Hollywood contract and Schlesinger’s masterpiece, Midnight Cowboy (1969), for which Schlesinger won an Academy Award. Schlesinger spent the next three decades making movies on both sides of the pond: Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975) and The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), among others. But Schlesinger was not above directing clunkers, most notably Honky Tonk Freeway (1981). “Few directors have known such startling inconsistency in their work, from truly transcendent, superbly realized films like Sunday, Bloody Sunday to muddled, incoherent wrecks like The Innocent,“ admits biographer William Mann. “Perhaps this unevenness prevents his elevation to the pantheon of greats.”

Schlesinger’s last movie was The Next Best Thing (2000), where the director had to deal with the antics of co-stars Madonna and Rupert Everett. Schlesinger’s ordeal on the set might have led to a debilitating stroke that he suffered on New Year’s Day, 2001. Schlesinger’s stroke prevented him from writing his autobiography, one of his life’s goals. Schlesinger and his life partner, photographer Michael Childers, then did the next best thing and invited film historian William J. Mann (Wisecracker and Behind the Screen) to write Schlesinger’s “authorized biography.” “When we first began working on this biography, several months after his first stroke, he was still choosing to speak,” Mann recalled. “In a whisper, he would answer my questions and offer insights into his life and career. As time went on, John stopped using his voice except on the rarest of occasions, but he continued to communicate with me through his eyes, or with a gesture of his hand or a turn of his head.”

Though Schlesinger could not provide much direct help, Mann got his and Childers’s full cooperation as well as use of Schlesinger’s autobiographical tapes, diaries, notes and letters. They also arranged for Mann to interview Schlesinger’s relatives as well as the likes of Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay, Dustin Hoffman, Glenda Jackson, Jon Voight and even Larry Kramer (with whom Schlesinger had a brief fling). Though Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger is an “authorized biography,” Mann does not hesitate to discuss the director’s personal or professional failings. Mann does idealize Schlesinger somewhat, and rushes through the director’s latter and less-productive years. Mann’s has a good story to tell, and his narrative becomes especially poignant when it goes between Schlesinger’s active past and his then-present; when the once dynamic artist and man was bedridden and his formerly uninhibited voice silenced.

It is proper that Edge of Midnight was written by an openly gay author, for much of Schlesinger’s life and art was influenced by the fact that he was a gay Jew. Though Mann does not go into Schlesinger’s Jewishness to great lengths, he admits that “John Schlesinger’s Jewishness, no matter how tangential his relationship to it, nonetheless fundamentally imprinted his life in ways both large and small.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Schlesinger never tried to hide his homosexuality. His relationship with Childers - the two met in 1968, when Schlesinger was 42 and Childers was 22 - was quite open, and endured till Schlesinger’s death. The couple enjoyed life to the fullest, and hosted some of the best parties in Hollywood. But they also stayed together through the hard times, after Childers’s HIV positive diagnosis in the 1980's and especially after Schlesinger’s debilitating - and eventually fatal - stroke.

Had Schlesinger been straight, he would have been a much different director. Being gay (and Jewish) no doubt moved him to explore how “people managed to live - actually, how to survive - in their marginalized worlds.” Mann sees “traces of the secure, grounded, homosexual sensibility that John nurtured in life show up in nearly all of his films, even his earliest...As John’s career progressed, these subtle little nods grew even more obvious.... Not only would he take on major gay themes in Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, but he would insert minor gay characters into films in which their sexuality had no relevance to the plot.” Sunday, Bloody Sunday, the story of a gay, Jewish doctor who shared his young, bisexual lover with a woman, was based on an incident in Schlesinger’s own life. As Schlesinger once said, “It’s my story, my own bloody Sunday - my affair with a young man. Nothing like it, ever, has been put on the screen before. That [same-sex] kiss was going to be in close-up or not at all.” Though Schlesinger was not perfect, he played an important role in GLBT film history, just as Edge of Midnight is a major and important work of GLBT biography.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner and many books. You may reach him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.