Michael Powell was born in the coastal English county of Kent. He started in the silent-era film industry of the 1920s, working countless studio odd jobs before he was promoted, in the 1930s, to directing low-budget “quota quickies,” of which he made almost two dozen. His eventual creative partner, Emeric Pressburger, came from what had once been the Austro-Hungarian Empire by way of Germany, where he’d been a writer at the famous UFA film studio, and France, where he’d fled for reasons of rising Nazism.
They met on the Alexander Korda-produced thriller , which Powell had been hired to direct and Pressburger had been brought in to rewrite, and began the most celebrated and mythologized partnership in British film. It appears to have been a meeting of sympathetic minds in which Powell’s quintessential Englishness, with its fondness for regional quirks and rugged country landscapes, was complemented by Pressburger’s ambitious plots and affection for fairy tales and theatrical enchantment. They formed their own production company (The Archers, with its distinctive bullseye logo), which gave them a remarkable, albeit inconsistent, level of artistic independence.
They shared directing, producing, and writing credits, though, in fact, it was Powell who did the directing while Pressburger largely handled the writing. Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger Between 1939 and 1957, they would produce 18 features,.
