Percy Adlon

Thoughtful, stylish postwar German filmmaker who began his career as an actor in repertory theater but soon graduated to editing and narrating literary programs for German radio. Adlon began working in TV in 1970, and made several shorts and documentaries before being commissioned, in 1978, to make a full-length television film, "The Guardian and His Poet," about Swiss poet Robert Walser and his publisher/mentor. Well-received at several major film festivals, "Guardian" paved the way for Adlon to make his first feature, "Celeste" (1981), a painstaking recreation of the last days of Marcel Proust as witnessed by his maid.