Michael Winner was born in Hampstead, London, England, to Helen (née Zlota) and George Joseph Winner, a company director. His family was Jewish; his mother was Polish and his father of Russian extraction. After his father's death, Winner's mother gambled recklessly and sold art and furniture worth around £10m, which had been bequeathed to her and her son.
Winner was educated at St Christopher School, Letchworth, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read law and economics. He also edited the university's student newspaper, Varsity, and wrote a newspaper column, 'Michael Winner's Showbiz Gossip,' in the Kensington Post from the age of 14.
He began his screen career as an assistant director of BBC television programmes, cinema shorts, and full-length "B" productions, occasionally writing screenplays. Winner's first on-screen credit was earned as a writer for the crime film Man with a Gun (1958) directed by Montgomery Tully. He directed his first travelogue, This is Belgium, in 1957, and his first feature film, Shoot to Kill, in 1960.
Winner's first significant film was West 11 (1963),a sympathetic study of rootless drifters in the then seedy Notting Hill area of London. He then set up his own company, Scimitar, and produced and directed several films, including The Girl-Getters (1964) and I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967),both starring Oliver Reed.
Winner developed a reputation as an efficient maker of violent action thrillers, often starring Charles Bronson. The most successful and controversial was Death Wish (1974),which attracted attention in America and led to Winner pursuing a Hollywood career in the 1970s.
By the 1990s Winner had become less prolific, and reaped no benefit from the Lottery-prompted rise in genre film-making, which favoured the young and inexperienced. He died on 21 January 2013, aged 77, at his home in Holland Park, London.
