It would be hard to overstate my father's gratitude. While he never considered giving up his American citizenship, that gratitude fuelled the affection he felt for Britain and its people and what he saw as their courage and decency. These were qualities he tried to highlight in films like The Key, The Victors and, of course, Young Winston. The same gratitude made him all the more determined to help foster British film-making talent through institutions like the National Film School and by producing films by young filmmakers.  

In many ways, his adoptive country suited him more than his own. He particularly loved its tolerance of eccentricity. America, during his lifetime at least, often seemed to put a premium on conformism, perhaps because it was a society which for decades had been assimilating millions of newcomers.  

But he never stopped loving the country of his birth. It was a deep, fierce, painful kind of love, not just because it was maintained in the face of rejection, but because it was love maintained in the fullest possible knowledge of his country's flaws. On the night of John F. Kennedy's assassination he and the actor Eli Wallach almost got into a fistfight on live television with the drunk and disrespectful Labour politician George Brown. Though opposed to the Vietnam War and despairing of America's support for Third World dictatorships in the name of "containing" communism, he detested the anti-American excesses of the anti-war movement. In particular, he loathed Jane Fonda's visit to North Vietnam to express solidarity with the soldiers who were killing her countrymen.  

When I was at school, I came across E.M. Forster's famous quotation, "If I had to choose between betraying my country or my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." At the time, I thought it was a wonderful, courageous sentiment and I said so to my father. To my shock, he turned on me in something close to fury. Foster's quip was disgusting, self-indulgent nonsense, he said. Think what it means, he urged me, to betray millions of trusting strangers. A character in Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle observes that for an exile, home is where "the bread tastes better, the sky is higher, the air is spicier, voices ring out more clearly, the ground is softer to walk on." For all the gratitude my father felt for England, my sense is that he felt a constant low-level homesickness. Hence the care packages that came over for nearly 25 years.  

Both in Britain and on location, even in places like Morocco or the north of Finland, friends and even friends of friends would arrive bearing a certain kind of hard salami from Chicago, proper American pickles and Lindy's cheesecake. With his writer friend Herbert Baker, who was back in LA, he would place bets on National Football League games, using a kind of code in telegrams that caused endless confusion and argument.