Alexander Walker, who spent more than four decades working as a film critic for the London Evening Standard, died on July 15. Cause of death was not released. He was 73.
Walker started reviewing films in the early 1950s. He joined the Standard seven years later after being recommended for the job by actor Kenneth More. For the next 43 years, Walker covering everything from major movie releases to film festivals for the newspaper.
“One of his most obvious characteristics was that you never knew which way he would go. Surprise was often a key element in his reviews. He resolutely refused to sit on the fence and staleness, caused by watching stream upon stream of bad movies as well as good ones, never set in. His prose was as polished and as fresh at 73 as when he started,” Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian.
Walker served as a governor of the British Film Institute from 1988-94, won the Critic of the Year prize from the British Press Awards three times and received the chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France in 1981.
Outside of his film critiques, Walker wrote 20 books, including biographies of Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Kubrick, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Sellers and Vivien Leigh. At the time of his death, he also planned to write a history of the British film industry.