Richard Attenborough^†

He could play a menacing psychopath with complete conviction, as anyone who saw Brighton Rock (1947) could tell you, but British cinema spent the next decade casting him as spivs and cowards anyway. That changed when he spent more than 20 years fighting to make Gandhi, a film every major studio dismissed as commercially hopeless, eventually putting his own life savings into the $22 million production. He won Best Director and Best Picture at the 1983 Oscars. The studios had been wrong the whole time.

He stepped back from acting in 1979 to focus on directing, a 14-year hiatus that Steven Spielberg ended when he cast him as John Hammond in Jurassic Park (1993), the enthusiastic billionaire who builds the dinosaur park. The role introduced him to a global generation that had no idea he'd won two Oscars. He was created Baron Attenborough the same year Jurassic Park came out. The House of Lords and children of the '90s discovered him simultaneously.

His parents took in two German Jewish girls through the Kindertransport during World War II, which gives you some sense of the household he grew up in. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami killed his daughter Jane and 15-year-old granddaughter Lucy in Thailand. He later asked to be buried alongside them at St Mary Magdalene church in Richmond. He was close enough to Princess Diana that she called him Dickie, and he coached her privately on public speaking in the early years of her marriage.

He died at Denville Hall five days before his 91st birthday. BAFTA published an official tribute acknowledging his decades of service as the organization's president. His wife Sheila, married to him for 69 years, survived him alongside his brother David Attenborough. His ashes were interred at St Mary Magdalene church in Richmond, alongside his daughter and granddaughter, as he had requested.