Ken Loach's first production for ITV, shown under the 'Sunday Night Theatre' strand (originally broadcast 18th July 1971). After a Lifetime is something of a neglected, social realist masterpiece that focuses on two brothers, brought together by the death of their father, reflecting on his life of militancy and political activism. At the time critic Nancy Banks Smith called it ‘brilliantly funny, and moving with a sort of subterranean rage’. Smith himself plays the older brother with a brilliant, raw emotion.
07-18-1971
1h 11m
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Ken Loach
Writer:
Neville Smith
Production:
Kestrel Films
Key Crew
Producer:
Tony Garnett
Director of Photography:
Chris Menges
Locations and Languages
Country:
GB
Filming:
GB
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Neville Smith
Born in Liverpool in 1940, Neville Smith, a one time collaborator of director Ken Loach, is one of a number of working-class actors and writers to have transformed the subject-matter and tone of television drama in the 1960s and 1970s. He was responsible for two of Loach's finest television films - 'The Golden Vision' (The Wednesday Play, BBC, tx. 17/4/1968) and After a Lifetime (ITV, tx. 18/7/1971) - but also developed a partnership with the director Stephen Frears, for whom he wrote the cult British detective film, Gumshoe (UK/US, 1971).
Bill Dean was a British actor who was born in Everton, Liverpool, Lancashire. He was born Patrick Anthony Connolly, but took his stage name in honour of Everton football legend William 'Dixie' Dean. After a atring of jobs, it was his work as a Lancashire club comedian that saw him spotted by Ken Loach who gave him his breakthrough role in his TV play The Golden Vision. Famous for his flat but penetrating Scouse tones, Dean went on to star as miserable pensioner Harry Cross in the long running Channel 4 soap Brookside from its inception in 1983 to 1990. He briefly returned to the series in 1999 for three episodes, when his character re-appeared in Brookside Close suffering from Alzheimer's disease and wrongly believing that he still lived there. The same character was the inspiration behind the 1980s group 'Jegsy Dodd and the sons of Harry Cross' who hailed from the Wirral and Dean himself appeared in the video of the Liverpudlian band The Farm's Groovy Train as Cross, who was a former train driver. He did of a heart attack aged 78 in 2000.
Peter Kerrigan was a Liverpudlian actor famous for his work on a series of TV plays, many of which were directed by Ken Loach, and for his role as George Malone in Alan Bleasdale's Boys From the Blackstuff. Born in Bootle in 1916, Kerrigan was a docker originally and, as a Communist Party member, founded the Birkenhead Port Workers Defence Committee. At some point in the '50s, he joined the National Association of Stevedores and Dockers and he wrote the 1958 pamphlet, 'What Next For Britain's Port Workers?' on behalf of the Socialist Labour League - the party he had joined following his departure from the CP. In official retirement Kerrigan became an actor appearing in the militant dockworkers drama The Big Flame, written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach. The play stimulated the formation of a political group of the same name, largely based in Liverpool. He was soon in demand, appearing in Loach's The Rank and File and Days of Hope, as well as the Play For Today's The Spongers and United Kingdom, and the drama The Gathering Seed - all of which were again written by Allen. He also appeared in Z Cars, The Sweeney, Family at War, Strumpet City, Crown Court, Brookside and Scully. But he'll perhaps be best remembered as George Malone in The Blackstuff and its subsequent spin off series, Boys from The Blackstuff, in which he played a blacklisted former docker and trade unionist.
