Ричард Постгейт: Жизнь и творчество британского аниматора и кукловода.

British animator, puppeteer and writer

Richard Oliver Postgate (12 April 1925 – 8 December 2008) was an English animator, puppeteer, and writer.

Postgate was educated at the private Woodstock School on Golders Green Road in Finchley in north west London and Woodhouse Secondary School, formerly known from 1923 onwards as Woodhouse Grammar School, also in Finchley (and now renamed Woodhouse College), followed by Dartington Hall School, a progressive private boarding school in Devon.

On return to the UK, from 1948 he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but drifted through a number of different jobs, never really finding his niche. In the 1970s and 1980s Postgate was active in the anti nuclear campaign, addressing meetings and writing several pamphlets including The Writing on the Sky. In 1986, in collaboration with the historian Naomi Linnell, Postgate painted a 50 feet (15 m) Illumination of the Life and Death of Thomas Becket for a book of the same name, which is now in the archive of the Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury. In 1990 he painted a similar work on Christopher Columbus for a book entitled The Triumphant Failure. A Canterbury Chronicle, a triptych by Postgate commissioned in 1990 hangs in the Great Hall of Eliot College on the University of Kent's Canterbury campus. In his later years, he blogged for the New Statesman. He was also a guest on The Russell Brand Show on 19 January 2008 where he discussed the making of Bagpuss and his subsequent work in TV and Film. Postgate's autobiography, Seeing Things, was published in 2000, and after Oliver died in 2008 his son Daniel wrote an afterword which was added at the end of the book. His grandfather was Labour Party leader (1932 1935) George Lansbury and he was cousin to English born American actress Angela Lansbury. He is distantly related to the Australian born writer and academic Coral Lansbury, whose son Malcolm Turnbull became the 29th Prime Minister of Australia.

Postgate died at a nursing home in Broadstairs, near his home on the Kent coast, on 8 December 2008, aged 83.