Carol Reed

Carol Reed directed The Third Man, the film that fixed occupied Vienna in the imagination and remains the most admired British film of its period. He was an illegitimate son of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, worked in the theatre, and made documentaries and features through the 1930s before directing training and campaign films during the Second World War. The Third Man, released in 1949, was shot on location in a Vienna still in ruins and divided into four occupation zones, from a script Graham Greene wrote after Reed sent him there to look. Its subject is the black market in diluted penicillin, which was real and killed children in the city's hospitals. Almost everything memorable in it was improvised or argued for: the zither score by Anton Karas, whom Reed heard playing in a wine tavern; the tilted camera angles that the cinematographer objected to; Orson Welles's cuckoo clock speech; and the long final shot of a woman walking past the camera without stopping, which Greene had wanted to end differently. The Berlin blockade was running while it was made, and the film's four-power Vienna is the same settlement seen from the other end. Reed also directed Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, and won an Academy Award for Oliver! in 1968. He was knighted in 1952, the first British film director to be. Greene's novella was written as preparation for the screenplay rather than as a book in its own right, and its ending differs from the film's, which Reed won the argument over. The Harry Lime theme was a number one record on both sides of the Atlantic and made Karas rich.

• Lived: 1906 CE – 1976 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist