Look Back in Anger (1980 film) Look Back in Anger (1980 film) Look Back in Anger is a 1980 British film starring Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Banes and Fran Brill, and directed by Lindsay Anderson and David Hugh Jones. The film is based on John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger". "Look Back in Anger" is about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man Jimmy Porter (Malcolm McDowell), his upper-middle-class, impassive wife Alison Porter (Lisa Banes), and her snooty best friend Helena Charles (Fran Brill). Cliff (Raymond Hardie), an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. Lindsay Anderson, who had previously worked with
Look Back in Anger best remembered for, though, are Jimmy's tirades. Some of these are directed against generalised British middle-class smugness in the post-atomic world. Many are directed against the female characters, a very distinct echo of Osborne's uneasiness with women, including his mother, Nellie Beatrice, whom he describes in his autobiography "A Better Class of Person" as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent". Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on Stella Linden, the older rep-company actress who first encouraged Osborne to write. After the first production in London, Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, who played Alison; he divorced his