Wearing ladies’ hats and brandishing props they have clearly pilfered from around their family home, a previously unseen photograph shows Richard and David Attenborough performing a sketch together as children.
It would be Richard who would go on to an acclaimed acting career, with his brother becoming a world-famous naturalist. The photograph — released by Lord Attenborough’s family to mark a year since his death — shows though that both were natural performers from a young age.
The University of Sussex and Michael Attenborough, Lord Attenborough’s son, projected a montage of the late actor and director’s life on to the side of the newly refurbished Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts at the university this weekend.
It included excerpts from his roles in Brighton Rock and Jurassic Park as well as from films he directed, including Gandhi and Chaplin.
Michael Attenborough has also released a series of previously unpublished photographs showing glimpses from his father’s childhood and private life to mark the anniversary of Lord Attenborough’s death, exactly a year ago today.
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One shows Richard and David, aged around 12 and 10, at home performing a sketch called Women What Does in front of their family, with Richard leaning on a stick and David holding a can of household metal cleaner.
Another shows Richard, aged about eight or nine, in his Wolf Cub uniform in the garden of the family home in Leicester, fishing in a pond with a stick.
A third, taken at Lord Attenborough’s family home in Richmond, Surrey, in 1961, shows the actor with his wife, Sheila Sim, and his children Michael, Jane and Charlotte, reading them a children’s book.
Michael Attenborough said: “Dad’s philosophy about the arts was that it should never be elitist. It should never be the property of a particular social class.
“His philosophy was based on tolerance, understanding, conciliation and empathy. I hope that the photographs reveal to everyone a side of dad that’s not commonly known, which was his absolute devotion to and love of family. The private, personal photographs demonstrate just what home and family meant to him.”