Richard Leacock (18 July 1921 – 23 March 2011)[1] was a British-born documentary film director and one of the pioneers of direct cinema and cinéma vérité.

Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands until being sent to boarding schools in England at the age of eight.

After filming Lack's expedition to the Canary and Galapagos Islands (1938–39), Leacock moved to the US and majored in physics at Harvard to master the technology of filmmaking.

He then spent three years as a combat photographer in Burma and China, followed by 14 months as cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (1946–48).

Daughter of the world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, she had studied at Radcliffe College, but graduated from Barnard in New York City.

After ethnographic fieldwork with the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) of Labrador, Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) earned her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University (1952).

Many relatively conventional jobs followed, until 1954, when Leacock was asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film he had written directed, photographed, and edited himself since Canary Bananas.

[1] This film, Toby and the Tall Corn, went on the American cultural TV program, Omnibus, in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at LIFE magazine in search of a less verbal approach to television reportage.

They then took their design to RCA who showed interest; and after receiving money from LIFE magazine, Drew and Leacock were able to make the first model and shoot their film Primary.

When most people think of the word “documentary,” they think of the observational mode that Leacock, Drew, and Pennebaker all played such a huge role in creating.

In 1947–1948, Leacock served as cameraman and co-director with John Ferno (Fernhaut) on seven short films in the 'Earth and Its People' series produced by Louis De Rochemont, two in France, and one each in Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and the Sahara Desert.

In France at the Cinémathèque Française, when Drew and Leacock screened Primary (1960) and On the Pole (1960), Henri Langlois introduced the films as "perhaps the most important documentaries since the brothers Lumiere".

When Drew went to work for ABC-TV, the Leacock-Pennebaker company was formed and produced Happy Mother's Day, Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop (1966), A Stravinsky Portrait and many others ending with the remnants of Jean-Luc Godard's One A.M. – One P.M. (1972).

[9] In 1989, he moved to Paris, where he met Valerie Lalonde, and they made Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock (84 minutes), the first major film shot with a tiny Video-8 Handycam to be broadcast on prime-time television in France.