A crowd fills the frame and keeps filling it. The funeral sequence in Gandhi was shot in Delhi in early 1981 with a vast number of volunteers, most of them unpaid, who turned out because they wanted to be there. I have run that reel more times than I can count, and the thing I watch for now is not the scale but the faces at the edges — people who came out of their own front doors that morning to stand in someone else's film. You cannot fake a crowd that wants to be a crowd.
The man who organised it had spent the earlier part of his working life being very small in other people's pictures. Richard Attenborough started young, played a frightened sailor in In Which We Serve, then years of nervy lads and small-time crooks, the ones who sweat in the third scene and are gone by the fifth. Bit parts, mostly, and he was good at them in a way that made the leads look better. Two Academy Awards later, six BAFTAs, the Fellowship in 1983, a knighthood in 1976 for services to film, and a career that ran across seven decades.
He died on this day in 2014, aged ninety. What I take from him is the arithmetic of it: a man who had once been the ninth name on a cast list, standing in a field outside Delhi, arranging hundreds of thousands of people and presumably remembering what it is to be one of them.
Constance, he bought Picasso ceramics for decades, one piece at a time — plates and jugs from the Vallauris workshops, thrown by the Ramié potters and painted by Picasso. Hundreds of them in the end, and mostly the humble shapes: a dish you could eat off, made strange.
Constance, he brought that same loyalty to Stamford Bridge — a Chelsea supporter from boyhood who served as a club director and later as life president. Fans there remember him in the stands as easily as in the credits, which feels like the right kind of double billing!