Norman Spencer, David Lean collaborator and ‘Vanishing Point’ producer, dies at 110

Norman Spencer, the British producer, production manager and screenwriter who regularly collaborated with director David Lean in the 1940s and ’50s, has died. He was 110.

The “Vanishing Point” producer died Aug. 16 in Wimbledon three days after his birthday, the European Supercentenarian Organisation reported.

Spencer worked with Lean on films including “Blithe Spirit,” “Great Expectations,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” Apart from his fellow Briton, he assistant-produced Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Southern gothic whodunit “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, as well as co-produced Richard Attenborough’s apartheid drama “Cry Freedom” (1987), starring Denzel Washington.

Norman Leslie Spencer was born in London on Aug. 13, 1914, and grew up in Essex. He began his career in the film industry in the mid-1930s working as an extra and was a gofer at Denham Film Studios, where he first met Lean, an editor, in 1942.

“We took a shine to each other — we were both mad about film and started going to the pictures together with our wives,” Spencer said in a 1999 interview for the British Entertainment History Project.

“We started making films together,” he added, and “when we’d finished one, we’d always want to make another right away. We’d haunt bookshops, and he’d say, ‘Within nine feet of us is a wonderful idea for a film.’ ”

Spencer’s big break came with Lean’s directorial debut, “In Which We Serve” (1942), on which he served as third assistant director. He also had a small part as an officer in the film.

In 1944, he launched Cineguild Productions alongside Lean, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, playwright Noël Coward and filmmaker Ronald Neame. He also worked for three years as an executive assistant under Elmo Williams, head of European production for Fox, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and the couple have two children, per IMDb.

At the time of his death, Spencer was thought to be the oldest man living in the Greater London area, and the second-oldest man living in the United Kingdom overall.