He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry.

[6][7][8] His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy and Abigail's Party.

His mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master, Mr Nutter, supplied the library with newly published plays.

During this time the most important part of his artistic consumption was cinema, although this was supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte.

Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh started to hone his directing skills at East 15 Acting School, where he met the actress Alison Steadman.

[21] Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, finding himself being taught how to "laugh, cry and snog" for weekly rep purposes, and became a sullen student.

Leigh had small roles in several British films in the early 1960s (West 11, Two Left Feet), and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC Television series Maigret.

[24] Leigh has been called "a gifted cartoonist ... a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television.

"[25][26] In 1965, Leigh went to work at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham as a resident assistant director and started to experiment with the idea that writing and rehearsing could be part of the same process.

[28] In 1970, Leigh wrote, "I saw that we must start off with a collection of totally unrelated characters (each one the specific creation of its actor) and then go through a process in which I must cause them to meet each other, and build a network of real relationships; the play would be drawn from the results."

After an exploratory improvisation period, Leigh would write a structure, indicating the order in which scenes happened, usually with a single bare sentence: Johnny and Sophie meet; Betty does Joy's hair; [etc.]

The television version of Abigail's Party was made at some speed; Steadman was pregnant at the time, and Leigh's objections to flaws in the production, particularly the lighting, led to his preference for theatrical films.

[30][31] For The Criterion Collection, Sean O'Sullivan wrote that the film was addressing "the crisis of national identity triggered by Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979".

Leigh was in Australia at the time—having agreed to attend a screenwriters' conference in Melbourne at the start of 1985, he had then accepted an invitation to teach at the Australian Film School in Sydney—and he then "buried his solitude and sense of loss in a busy round of people, publicity and talks".

Leigh's stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy, and Abigail's Party.

[35] In the 1990s, Leigh enjoyed critical successes, including such films as the comedy Life Is Sweet (1990) starring Alison Steadman, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Claire Skinner, and Jane Horrocks.

Derek Malcolm of The Guardian wrote that the film "is certainly Leigh's most striking piece of cinema to date" and that "it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist.

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 92% with the consensus, "with a piercingly powerful performance by Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake brings teeming humanity to the controversial subject of abortion.

Observer critic Mark Kermode called the film a "portrait of a man wrestling light with his hands as if it were a physical element: tangible, malleable, corporeal".

In 2015, Leigh accepted an offer from English National Opera to direct the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance (with conductor David Parry, designer Alison Chitty, and starring Andrew Shore, Rebecca de Pont Davies and Jonathan Lemalu).

[58] According to critic Michael Coveney, Leigh's films and stage plays "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period.

"[63] Leigh has helped to create stars—Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Antony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life Is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked—and it has been said that the list of actors who have worked with him—including Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, and Julie Walters—"comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent.

In The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma wrote: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh.

[67] The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by "a detached, medical watchfulness", Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to Ozu's.

Michael Coveney wrote: "The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime and Naked.

And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlies (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work and the pub scene in Life Is Sweet".

"[76][77][78] In November 2019, along with other public figures, Leigh signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calling him "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsing him in the 2019 UK general election.

[79] In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, Leigh signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election.

The letter stated: "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few.