1984 (1956 film) 1984 (1956 film) 1984 is a 1956 British black-and-white science fiction film, based on the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell, depicting a totalitarian future society. This is the first cinema rendition of the story, directed by Michael Anderson and starring Edmond O'Brien as protagonist Winston Smith, and featuring Donald Pleasence, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave. The character O'Brien, the antagonist, was renamed "O'Connor", due to the shared surname of the actor Edmond O'Brien. The film was distributed in 1956 on a double bill with another British sci-fi film, "The Gamma People". After the customary distributor agreement expired, the film
George Orwell bibliography and Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1968–1970. Peter Davison of De Montfort University spent 17 years researching and correcting the entirety of Orwell's works with Angus and Sheila Davison, and devoted the last eleven volumes of the twenty-volume series "The Complete Works of George Orwell" to essays, letters, and journal entries. The entire series was initially printed by Secker and Warburg in 1986, finished by Random House in 1998, and revised between 2000 and 2002. Starting with "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941), several of Orwell's longer essays took the form of pamphlets: Orwell was not widely known for writing verse,