- Born
- Died
- Birth nameBarry Leslie Norman
- Nickname
- Barely Normal
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- Barry Norman was the son of Leslie Norman, a British film and television director, producer and writer, and his wife Elizabeth. He was educated at a state primary school and at Highgate School, then an all-boys independent school in North London. He did not go to university, but instead began his career in journalism at the Kensington News, later spending a period in South Africa where he developed a hostility to the situation created there by the emergence of apartheid.
By the 1960s, Norman was a prominent journalist, and show business editor of the Daily Mail until 1971, when he was made redundant. Subsequently, he wrote a column each Wednesday for The Guardian, also contributing leader columns to the newspaper.
He presented BBC1's Film programme from 1972, becoming the sole presenter the following year. Norman's involvement was broken in 1982 by a brief spell presenting Omnibus. After having returned to the Film series in 1983, Norman became increasingly irritated by the BBC's reluctance to screen the programme at a regular time, and in 1998 he finally accepted an offer to work for BSkyB, where he remained for three years. Jonathan Ross took his place as the BBC programme's presenter.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Charlie Barnes
- SpouseDiana Narracott(1957 - January 27, 2011) (her death, 2 children)
- Children
- Parents
- He was a staunch supporter of the British monarchy over the possibility of a republican alternative. He once stated a reason for this was that he would have hated to have seen President Margaret Thatcher.
- When he was asked towards the end of his life what he considered to be the worst film he had ever seen, he identified Shivers (1975).
- He was associated with the phrase "and why not?", which originated not as his catchphrase - though he did say it occasionally on his programmes - but as that of his puppet likeness on the satirical show Spitting Image (1984). Norman later adopted the phrase himself and it was the title of his autobiography.
- Norman had a family recipe for pickle that has been passed down through generations and was used as the recipe for his own brand of pickled onions, which went on sale in September 2007.
- Son of director/producer Leslie Norman and Elizabeth (nee Crafford), who met when both worked in the cutting rooms of British International Pictures at Elstree. He was the brother of Valerie E. Norman and former brother-in-law of Bernard Williams.
- [speaking in 2004] I believe the best films today are as good as, and technically far better than, any that have gone before, but generally speaking it's no good looking to Hollywood for such films, because it does not want the new and daring but the tried and trusted - revamped versions of what has proved popular before and might therefore appeal to a current, younger audience that never saw the originals.
- Schwarzenegger (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is not an actor, he's a human special effect.
- [on Buster (1988)] It doesn't exactly glorify crime but it certainly romanticizes it. There are moments when you get the impression that were it not for their trifling oversight in omitting to distribute their ill-gotten gains among the deserving poor, the train robbers were just like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and Buster and June emerge ever so sweet and touching, only a pair of tarnished innocents really. But fair do's, though the film itself may be amoral and even deplorable in its neglect of the act of violence, the performances are very good. In particular, Phil Collins and Julie Walters are so good that with a better script they might have made you wonder what all the fuss was about. As it is, I think the fuss was really justified.
- [on Mona Lisa (1986)] I've never understood why Cathy Tyson didn't have a much better movie career. Here on her screen debut in Neil Jordan's scarily tense thriller she gives a terrific performance as a high-priced call girl to whom gang boss Michael Caine appoints ex-con Bob Hoskins as driver and minder ... Hoskins and the coldly sinister Caine are on top form. Tyson is just as good. In Hollywood, she'd have become a star. Here, sadly, she didn't.
- [on The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)] Of all the Ealing comedies, this is among the best. The Oscar-winning screenplay by T.E.B. Clarke does what all good farces must do - it takes the possible and stretches it, with seeming logic, into the wildly improbable and we, the audience, are swept along, desperately wanting the mob to get away with it. At the heart of it all is the funny, oddly touching relationship between Guinness (Alec Guinness) and Holloway (Stanley Holloway) - two mild, courteous, inoffensive middle-aged men dreaming a wild and naughty dream and having the initiative to seize the day and make it happen. When it finishes back in Rio, you may well decide that comedy crime capers don't come much better than this.
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