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 Orwells moved to a seventh-floor flat at Langford Court, St John's Wood, while at Wallington Orwell was "digging for victory" by planting potatoes. In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine Imperial links. This was Orwell's first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office, and it gave him an opportunity to create cultural programmes with contributions from T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E. M. Forster, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and