Christopher Miles burst upon the film world in 1963 with a 30-minute short that he wrote and directed. It was called Six-Sided Triangle and it brought him, at the age of 23, an Oscar nomination. Starring his equally precocious sister, Sarah Miles, it satirised the cinematic styles and sexual mores of six different cultures in their approach to the eternal triangle of husband, wife and lover.
The film, made for less than £6,000, was largely financed by the Boulting Brothers, arguably Britain’s leading film makers from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. They had been impressed by Miles’s earlier short, Vol d’Oiseau, which had won Best Short at the San Francisco Film Festival.
Miles was a trim, compact figure who made up for any lack