On November 11, Sotheby’s will auction 50 works from the art collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough. Next week, the sale catalogue (of 50 lots, including L. S. Lowry and Barbara Hepworth) will be published. Lord Attenborough tells his son Michael how the collection came to be amassed.

Q: Where and when did your passion for painting and sculpture begin?

It comes directly from my parents — in particular my father. He passionately believed that the arts had a fundamental role at the centre of a rounded and civilising education. When he was principal at Borough Road Training College in Isleworth he spent college funds on a beautiful painting by Sisley to be hung in a conspicuous place where it could be enjoyed by all the students. His reward was a brick hurled through his living-room window. To the day he died, my wife Sheila and I always delighted in showing any thrilling new purchase to him before anyone else.

People claim I’m an inveterate weeper, but in relation to the visual arts it’s almost the opposite. On seeing a stunning painting for the first time I find myself uttering sounds curiously close to laughter. It’s an expression of delighted shock and wonder, the moment when you are jolted into seeing the world differently through the eyes and expressive genius of the artist.

Q: Did you share this passion with other friends and colleagues in your profession?

The extraordinary change Sheila and I have witnessed in our lifetime is the gradual falling away of interest in collecting pictures by fellow members of our profession. When we were young it was quite normal for actors to buy paintings. I suspect that much contemporary art may be too rarefied and bizarre to interest many actors and that work from previous periods is now simply beyond their pockets.

Two of my son’s godparents, John Mills and John Boulting, were devoted art collectors from an early age. More recently, the actor Peter Barkworth became a close friend and we took great delight in sharing our latest discoveries as avid fellow art obsessives. And I recall Larry Olivier and Ralph Richardson taking huge delight in collecting paintings for their homes.

Such was mine and Sheila’s passion that we had a few paintings on the walls of our Richmond home acquired at a very young and impecunious time when we couldn’t even afford carpets and curtains.

Q: Why have you decided to part with your collection?

Today this passion has led us to the position of possessing more paintings than those walls can contain. As building the collection has been an integral part of our life together, we came to the decision that we wanted to be the ones to preside over the dispersal of some of these paintings. We have loved and cherished these wonderful pieces throughout the course of our lives, but in all truth, art belongs to no one, some of us are simply its temporary, fortunate custodians.

Q: Did you know personally any of the artists whose work you collected?

Well yes, we knew Sir Matthew Smith, who lived very close to our first rented home in Coulson Street in Chelsea, Graham Sutherland, Ed Burra, Stanley Spencer and two lifelong friends Brian Kneale and Brian Organ. We got to know Henry Moore and clearly remember going to visit him; indeed, on one occasion in particular, when he could barely move, having put his back out trying to shift one of his large bronzes, he explained that sculpture was temporarily out of the question in his incapacitated state and that he would now set about drawing the sheep he could see through his workshop window.

Q: Did you ever meet Lowry?

Yes, in fact we did, on a number of occasions. Sheila and I bumped into him at a London gallery one day and offered him a lift to the Tate Gallery, where he was about to have a one-man exhibition. We dropped him off round the back of the building and watched him disappear down a flight of steps wearing a long, shabby raincoat that made him look like a tramp. I said to Sheila I thought we should wait to be certain he was all right. And sure enough he re-emerged a minute later, trudging his way back to the car and in memorably sad tones explaining, “I don’t think they know who I am!”

Q: Much of your collection consists of figurative work with a sense of narrative, do you know why?

My job as a film director is above all to tell stories. The most essential component of drama is energy. Energy impelled by the past, distilled in the present and busting with possibilities for the future. In art this is created by the freeze-frame quality of absolute stillness and the feeling of movement that has brought us to this moment and just might whisk us off again into the future.

The other quality that film and painting share is an obsession with light. I believe painting often outstrips film in its ability to create the unique qualities of light. Its movements, its heat, its transience.

Certain images in my movies have been directly influenced by art. Nevinson’s etching of four soldiers up a telegraph pole during the First World War is painstakingly recreated in my first film as a director, Oh! What a Lovely War. Indeed the end of that movie consists a scene of a little girl (my beautiful young daughter, Charlotte) running through a field of poppies, whose inspiration clearly owes a lot to a certain Claude Monet.

Q: Do you have a favourite painting from your own collection?

If I was forced to choose one, it would perhaps be Christopher Wood’s Mending the Nets. My father also felt it came as near as he could imagine to the perfect painting. Interestingly, its also been my son’s favourite since a very early age.

Q: Who has influenced you the most over the years in the formation of your collection?

Many people — mainly gallery owners or curators, Andras Kalman, Dudley Tooth and Dickie Smart at Tooth’s, Rex Nan Kivell and Harry Miller at the Redfern and Gerald Corcoran at the Leferre, some of whom we met at an early age when we were touring in the theatre.

Q: Has your taste changed over the years?

No, I don’t think so. I still love all the paintings we bought when we were young. But I think my taste has expanded. I remember the shock of seeing my first Bacon — an utter genius — and indeed my first purchase of a completely abstract work — by Victor Pasmore.

Q: Has the act of collecting led you into any unusual situations?

Two occasions spring to mind. I had always coveted a gorgeous Matthew Smith — an oil of peonies — owned by my friend John Mills. Johnnie had to raise some money at one point and so he offered it to me. I happily bought it but urged him to keep it on his wall and to leave it to me after his death, which he did.

The other was when I too desperately needed to raise money — in fact for my film Gandhi. So I sold my beloved Card Players by Christopher Wood, inspired by Cézanne and one of the first paintings I ever bought from the Redfern in 1949. As soon as it became available again and I could afford it, I bought it back.

Q: What tends to influence your choice in works of art?

I don’t tend to respond to life intellectually — at least not in the first instance. I respond instinctively and sensually. The same is true of works of art. They have the ability to kick me in the gut, to give me the feeling that all my senses are being stimulated, so that alongside the visual I experience the sound and smell of the particular moment that has been so magically captured and suspended in time.

The full sale catalogue will be available to view at sothebys.com from Wed

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