Former London Evening Standard film critic Alan Brien has died at the age of 83.

The Sunderland-born journalist wrote for a variety of publications during a long and varied career which began in the 1950s on a specialist magazine for amateur film-making enthusiasts.

As well as reviewing cinema for the Standard, Brien was a TV critic for the Observer and covered theatre for the Spectator, where he was also features editor.

He also wrote about politics for the then Sunday Pictorial, and was the Sunday Times’ man in both Moscow and Saigon in the early 1970s.

Brien was married four times. He wed Sunderland girlfriend Pamela Jones in 1947, New Yorker Nancy Newbold Ryan in 1961, and the Guardian writer Jill Tweedie in 1973.

After Tweedie’s death in 1993, he married writer Jane Hill in 1996. He is survived by his five children, a stepson and seven grandchildren.