[1] He was among a generation of British directors who would begin their career making documentaries and television commercials before going on to have success in films.
Hugh Hudson was born at 27 Welbeck Street, London, the son and only child of Michael Donaldson-Hudson and his second wife Jacynth Mary Ellerton, from Cheswardine in rural northeast Shropshire.
The company emerged with much success in the 1960s, winning many awards and pioneering a new graphic style for documentary and advertising films.
From 1979 to 1980, Hudson directed his first and most successful feature film, Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two British track runners, one a devout Christian and the other an ambitious Jew, in the run-up to the 1924 Olympic Games.
"[3] In 2017, some 37 years after its showing at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, it was shown to a large audience at the Classic Screenings beach cinema to help support the bid for the 2024 Olympic Games to be held in Paris.
In 1985, Hudson directed Revolution, which depicted the American War of Independence, and which was released before it was a fully completed film.
[4] The film was a critical and commercial failure at the box office and earned Hudson a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Director.
[5] The film was an American-based drama starring Donald Sutherland and Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and dealing with disaffected youth in California.
In 2006, Hudson was reported to be working, together with producer John Heyman, on an historical epic based on the life of the monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti.
The Observer film critic Philip French writing about the new version said, "Revolution was misunderstood and unjustly treated on its first appearance twenty years ago.
Hudson's film should take its place among the great movies about history and about individual citizens living in times of dramatic social change.
In 1988, Hudson directed a 2½-minute advertisement for British Rail, in the style of, and in homage to, the Post Office Film Unit's 25-minute documentary Night Mail, which was made in 1936.
[9] Poet W. H. Auden had written verse specifically to fit the original 1936 film's footage, which showed the enormous scale of BR's daily operation and the structure of the 'sectorised' business.
The opening sequence of Hudson's British Rail advert features the northbound Travelling Post Office with Auden's original verse, narrated by Sir Tom Courtenay.
[17] Hudson won Grand Prix Cannes Lions awards for his 1972 Levi's "Walking Behinds"[18] and 1978 Coty L'Aimant "French Lesson" adverts.