He began the decade with an emblematic project and a career high, portraying Sinclair Lewis’ charismatic conman turned evangelist in Richard Brooks’ film of Elmer Gantry (1960). It was a dazzling, bittersweet portrayal that earned him the Best Actor Oscar. Always sympathetic to ‘important’ subject matter and socially-minded messages, Lancaster followed Gantry’s controversial success with a series of films addressing themes of personal interest to the actor, such as social welfare, prison reform and political extremism, as seen in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Capping this period was the title role (originally earmarked for Olivier) in Luchino Visconti’s extraordinary The Leopard (Il Gattopardo 1963), an epic tale of a fading Sicilian aristocrat.

By the mid-60s, a series of financial flops and a generational shift had lost the actor his box-office clout. There were to be fewer personal projects ahead – The Swimmer (1968), a haunting fairy tale of midlife crisis, among those few – and more genre work. It was a return to the ‘hero business’ as Lancaster would put it, though they were usually, typically, flawed heroes. And genre or no, the films were not lacking in message or metaphor, like Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), an adventure tale with undercurrent themes of loyalty and idealism, and the blistering Ulzana’s Raid (1972), a Vietnam-conscious Western.

Lancaster continued to act, a tremendous, fierce and unique presence to the end of his life. Our salute peaks with Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1981), the funny, elegiac tale of an aged gangster’s last score, (Lancaster’s finest late work and a very fitting bookend to The Killers) and Bill Fosyth’s Local Hero (1983).
www.bfi.org.uk/lancaster