Every once in a while, retirement can make you think a person’s dead. When someone hasn’t made a movie since 1991, and that was a concert film (for someone who’d made a couple of films for him some decades ago), it can be easy to assume that they’re dead. Especially if they’re not someone particularly in the public eye. So when I was showing my kids Hard Day’s Night recently, I thought about doing director Richard Lester for Attention Must Be Paid. But he’s not eligible, and it’s not because he falls into that five-year gap where you’re ineligible for either column, either!

Although American by birth, Lester has done most of his work in the UK. He worked briefly in Philadelphia, directing Action in the Afternoon for WCAU for about a year, then moved to London. He worked on TV, but this was in the early days of TV—live. He switched to film directing mostly because he liked doing second takes. Most notably, he directed the short film “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” (Which was nominated for an Oscar, but under the name of its producer, Peter Sellers, so Lester has no Oscar nominations at all.) I haven’t seen it, but it’s remarkably low budget—namely 70 pounds, which everyone seems to need to point out includes five pounds to rent the field.

It was this film that brought him to the attention of the Beatles. They were given a list of directors, apparently, and they recognized his name and chose him because of his work with Spike Milligan. Filmed music would never be the same; he may never have gotten an Oscar nomination, but he received an MTV Video Vanguard Award (along with the Palme d’Or, one of the only awards he’s ever received) for having essentially invented the language of the music video.

For a while, it did quite nice things for his career; I’m surprised to discover that A Hard Day’s Night is his only Criterion Collection movie. I’m not sure I’d like The Knack . . . and How to Get It, even if it does sound like a pretty definitive Swinging ’60s movie—or perhaps because it does—but it’s an interesting choice to win, especially as it was the year that Olivia de Havilland (another person discussed in this column, not the other one!) famously became the first woman to head the jury at Cannes. And that Mary Poppins was screened out of competition; I wonder which would have won if it had been competing.

Lester retired from directing when his friend and colleague Roy Kinnear fell off a horse while filming The Return of the Musketeers, broke his pelvis, and died. He’d cast Kinnear in many movies, going back to Help! (Another film that defined the language of music videos; basically, he made the two good Beatles movies.) They’d been friends through Lester’s lean years, between doing Swinging ’60s movies and doing swashbucklers and also Superman. (For the record, he may not have known Superman as a child but was familiar with the character by the time he directed the movies.) And after his friend died, he decided directing wasn’t worth it. You can’t blame him, really.

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