Alexander Walker (The British Museum, 2004)
top The bathroom showing Sean Scully, Abstract Landscape, 1989 top and Rachel Whiteread, Pink, 1993, above bath photograph © Rob Carter above The study showing Philip Custon, Room, 1980 at left and three prints from Robert Mangold’s Untitled 1-VII, 1992, on cupboard doors, with an Edda Renouf painting above photograph © Rob Carter Alexander Walker was obsessed with films and things visual from an early age. He was born on 22 March 1930 in Portadown, Northern Ireland, the only son of a travelling salesman. With his mother he would go to the local cinema, devouring films with an appetite he later described as 'gluttonous and undiscriminating’. He first saw Orson Welles' Citizen Kane at the age of twelve; it remained his favourite film. At Portadown his only encounters with art were the reproductions of Vermeer and Bellini that his mother hung on the walls of their home. After attending Portadown Grammar School, where aged fifteen he wrote a radio play which was broadcast on Northern Ireland Home Service, he studied political philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast. He went on to the College of Europe in Bruges and to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he lectured in comparative government for two years from 1952, before taking up a career in journalism. From 1954 to 1956 he worked on the Birmingham Gazette as features editor, then on the Birmingham Post as leader writer and film critic, before being appointed as the Evening Standard's film critic by Lord Beaverbrook in 1960. He remained with the Evening Standard for the next forty-three years, becoming Britain’s longestserving newspaper film critic. A vocal, often pugnacious critic, Walker was never afraid to express his views, however controversial. His weekly column was always well-argued, elegantly written and highly readable. His outspokenness was not infrequently directed at the British Film Institute, where he served as a governor between 1988 and 1994. Three times, in 1970, 1974 and 1998, he was named Critic of the Year by the British press. As well as being a fearless critic, Walker was also a prolific author of some twenty books on film stars and the film industry. Among his books are biographies of Peter Sellers, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich and a definitive study of his friend, the director Stanley Kubrick. Hollywood, England, his well-researched analysis of the expanding British film industry in the 1960s, and National Heroes, its sequel of the 1970s, became classic textbooks of the film business. He was working on a third volume on what he regarded as the decline of British cinema when he died on 15 July 2003.