A parade of Hollywood folk coming over for Sunday brunch was also a kind of cultural lifeline to "home", whether it was Zero Mostel, Martin Ritt, José Ferrer or Joan Crawford (with whom he'd had an affair many years before), who would bring her own flask of Smirnoff vodka because she preferred it to the icy Stolichnaya and Wyborowa we served at home.  

He had left an ostensibly egalitarian society for a notoriously caste-ridden one. But as an American and a filmmaker he found himself the carrier of a kind of social passport that gave him the ability to go anywhere and talk to just about anyone. Eventually, he felt that he was intimate enough with the country to be comfortable with Britain or Britons as a subject.  

The end result was Young Winston (1972), which may be my personal favourite of all his films (and which sadly is only available in a truncated version). I see it as a kind of Valentine to the Britain that had embraced him — an expression of love and understanding, a hymn to an imperial Britain whose vestiges were deeply unfashionable in 1972 and have now almost completely vanished. Even the villains of the piece — Lords Salisbury and Kitchener — are depicted with affection. It always amazed me that he could have written the wrenching father-son scenes in Young Winston, which, he said, drew on his own experiences with his own unforgiving father. To me, they seemed like blueprints for conversations that he and I had a few years later.  

Yet my father never became one of those Americans who "go native" in Europe and become terrible snobs. Certainly, he enjoyed the traditional rituals of British life that then bound Britons to their past. He was immensely proud of his CBE. But he never tried to look or sound or act anything other than American. Even the dark suits he had made in Savile Row were cut in that American style familiar from Cary Grant films.

When we finally returned to America and Hollywood in 1975, I think he missed England and the second life he had built there even more than we did. Hollywood had changed. The studio system was dead. It had been replaced by a version of today's clustering of global corporate subsidiaries run by men who all too often lacked the old moguls' redeeming love of movies.