“The British are coming!” exclaimed the screenwriter Colin Welland at the Oscars ceremony in 1982, brandishing the statuette he had just won for Chariots of Fire (1981), a small-scale, factually based British sporting drama which took three further prizes that night including best picture. But the film’s director, Hugh Hudson, could only wince as he listened to the speech. “Oh Christ, Colin, why do you say these things?” he later recalled thinking to himself. “You talk too much. You’re too verbose!”
Along with his contemporaries Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, Hudson, who has died aged 86, made his name directing stylish, expensive commercials in Britain. He estimated that he shot more than 1,500 of them prior to his big-screen debut with Chariots of Fire, which told the story of two British athletes, Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), who won gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics after overcoming personal hurdles; Abrahams faced antisemitism at Cambridge, where he was a student, while Liddell, a devout Christian who claimed to feel God’s pleasure in him when he ran, refused to compete on the Sabbath even when his Olympic race was scheduled for that day.
