Mike Leigh

Sunday, 09 December 2012

The Short and Curlies - Mike Leigh (1987)

All Or Nothing - Official Trailer (2002, Mike Leigh)

Working with Mike Leigh: 'I think 'intense' is too small a word b

Another Year - Mike Leigh - BlackBerry Interview

Kermode and Mayo talk Mike Leigh's method

Career Girls - Cardinal Traits - Mike Leigh

Director's Cut: Mike Leigh on Secrets and Lies - Film 2011 With Claudia Winkleman - BBC One

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Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east. It is one of the country's 33 provinces with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island. The province covers a few small neighbouring islands as well as the isle of Bali.
With a population recorded as 3,891,428 in the 2010 census, the island is home to most of Indonesia's Hindu minority. In the 2000 census about 92.29% of Bali's population adhered to Balinese Hinduism while most of the remainder follow Islam. It is also the largest tourist destination in the country and is renowned for its highly developed arts, including traditional and modern dance, sculpture, painting, leather, metalworking, and music. Bali, a tourist haven for decades, has seen a further surge in tourist numbers in recent years.
Bali was inhabited by around 2000 BC by Austronesian peoples who migrated originally from Taiwan through Maritime Southeast Asia. Culturally and linguistically, the Balinese are thus closely related to the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Oceania. Stone tools dating from this time have been found near the village of Cekik in the island's west.

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Birmingham
Birmingham (ⁱ/ˈbɜrmɪŋəm/ BUR-ming-əm, locally /ˈbɜrmɪŋɡəm/ BUR-ming-gəm) is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 (2010 estimate), and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a population of 2,284,093 (2001 census). Birmingham's metropolitan area is also the United Kingdom's second most populous with a population of 3,683,000.
A medium-sized market town during the medieval period, Birmingham grew to international prominence in the 18th century at the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution, which saw the town at the forefront of worldwide developments in science, technology and economic organisation, producing a series of innovations that laid many of the foundations of modern industrial society. By 1791 it was being hailed as "the first manufacturing town in the world". Birmingham's distinctive economic profile, with thousands of small workshops practising a wide variety of specialised and highly-skilled trades, encouraged exceptional levels of creativity and innovation and provided a diverse and resilient economic base for industrial prosperity that was to last into the final quarter of the 20th century. Its resulting high level of social mobility also fostered a culture of broad-based political radicalism, that under leaders from Thomas Attwood to Joseph Chamberlain was to give it a political influence unparalleled in Britain outside London and a pivotal role in the development of British democracy.

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Blackburn
Coordinates: 53°44′42″N 2°28′37″W / 53.7449°N 2.4769°W / 53.7449; -2.4769
Blackburn ( pronounced /ˈblækbɜrn/) (help·info)) is a large town in Lancashire, England. It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley, 9 miles (14 km) east of the city of Preston, 27 miles (43 km) north-northwest of the city of Manchester. and is 13 miles (21 km) north of the border with Greater Manchester. Blackburn is bounded to the south by Darwen, with which it forms the unitary authority area of Blackburn with Darwen, Blackburn being the administrative centre. At the time of the UK Government's 2001 census, Blackburn had a population of 105,085, whilst the wider borough of Blackburn with Darwen had a population of 140,700.
A former mill town, textiles have been produced in Blackburn since the middle of the 13th century, when wool was woven in people's houses in the domestic system. Flemish weavers who settled in the area during the 14th century helped to develop the woollen cottage industry in the region.James Hargreaves, inventor of the spinning jenny, was a weaver in Blackburn. The most rapid period of growth and development in Blackburn's history coincided with the industrialisation and expansion of textile manufacturing. Blackburn was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the first industrialised towns in the world.

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Brocket Hall
Coordinates: 51°48′04″N 0°14′46″W / 51.801°N 0.246°W / 51.801; -0.246

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Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival (French: Le Festival International du Film de Cannes or just Festival de Cannes), is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is the world's most prestigious and publicized film festival. The invitation-only festival is held annually (usually in May) at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
The 2012 Cannes Film Festival took place from May 16 to May 27, 2012. The President of the Jury was the Italian film director Nanni Moretti.
The Cannes Film Festival has its origins in the late 1930s when Jean Zay, the French Minister of National Education, on the proposal of Philippe Erlanger and with the support of the British and Americans,^{[clarification needed]} set up an international cinematographic festival. In 1947, the festival was held as the "Festival du film de Cannes", where films from sixteen countries were presented. Moreover, the principle of equality was introduced, so that the jury was to be made up only of one representative per country. Also, this year the festival was held at the made-for-the-occasion Palais des Festivals, although the roof was unfinished and blew off during a storm. The festival was not held in 1948 and 1950 on account of budgetary problems. In 1951, owing to better relations between France and Italy, the Cannes Festival was moved to Spring, while the Mostra remained in Autumn.

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Charlotte Street
Charlotte Street is a well-known street in Fitzrovia, central London, England. The southern half of the street has many restaurants and cafes, and a lively nightlife during the evening; while the northern part of the street is more mixed in character and includes the large office building of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and a University College London (UCL) student hall of residence, Astor College. The street has a significant residential population living above the ground floor. Two conservation areas are contained within the street: Charlotte Street conservation area (Camden) and Charlotte Street West conservation area (City of Westminster)
Charlotte Street was named in honour of Queen Charlotte who was married to King George III in 1761, and the street was formed in 1763. It was one of three streets in and around Fitzrovia which took her name. The other two have since been renamed Hallam Street and Bloomsbury Street. Fitzrovia itself was named after the Fitzroy Tavern, a public house on Charlotte Street. The boundary of Camden and Westminster runs along part of Charlotte Street.

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Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire (ⁱ/ˈhɑrtfərdʃɪər/ or /ˈhɑrfərdʃər/; abbreviated Herts) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.
Hertfordshire is one of the home counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London (to the south), Buckinghamshire (to the west), Bedfordshire (including the unitary authorities of Luton and Central Bedfordshire to the north), Cambridgeshire (to the north east) and Essex (to the east).
Hertfordshire was originally the area assigned to a fortress constructed at Hertford under the rule of Edward the Elder in 913. The name Hertford is derived from the Anglo-Saxon heort ford, meaning deer crossing (of a watercourse). The name Hertfordshire first appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1011. Deer feature prominently in many county emblems.
There is evidence of human beings living in Hertfordshire since the Middle Stone Age. It was first farmed during the Neolithic period and permanent habitation appeared at the beginning of the Bronze Age. This was followed by tribes settling in the area during the Iron Age.

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Higher Broughton
Coordinates: 53°29′54″N 2°15′31″W / 53.49842°N 2.258561°W / 53.49842; -2.258561
Broughton is a suburb of Salford, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on the east bank of the River Irwell and A56 road, in the northeastern part of the City of Salford, 1.3 miles (2.1 km) north-northwest of Manchester city centre and 2.1 miles (3.4 km) south of Prestwich. Broughton consists of Broughton Park, Higher Broughton, Lower Broughton and a part of Kersal. Its immediate proximity to Manchester effectively makes it a suburb of that city, although it is politically and administratively separate.
Historically a part of Lancashire, Broughton anciently constituted a township and chapelry in the parish of Manchester and hundred of Salford. The former manor house, Broughton Hall, belonged to the Chethams and the Stanleys, both of whom were distinguished local families, and later passed, by marriage, to the Clowes family. A part of Broughton was amalgamated into the then Municipal Borough of Salford in 1844, and the remaining area of the township in 1853.

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Lancashire
Lancashire ( /ˈlæŋkəʃər/ or, less commonly, /ˈlæŋkəʃɪər/) is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston. Lancashire is sometimes referred to by the abbreviation Lancs, as originally used by the Royal Mail. The population of the county is 1,449,700. People from the county are known as Lancastrians.
The history of Lancashire is thought to have begun with its founding in the 12th century. In the Domesday Book (1086), some of its lands had been treated as part of Yorkshire. The land that lay Inter Ripam et Mersam, "between the Ribble and Mersey", formed part of the returns for Cheshire. Once its initial boundaries were established, it bordered Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire and Cheshire.
Lancashire emerged during the Industrial Revolution as a major commercial and industrial region. The county encompassed several hundred mill towns and collieries. By the 1830s, approximately 85% of all cotton manufactured worldwide was processed in Lancashire.Preston, Accrington, Blackburn, Bolton, Rochdale, Oldham, Chorley, Darwen, Nelson, Colne and Burnley were major cotton mill towns during this time. Blackpool was a major centre for tourism for the inhabitants of Lancashire's mill towns, particularly during wakes week.

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Levenshulme
Coordinates: 53°26′49″N 2°11′13″W / 53.447°N 2.187°W / 53.447; -2.187
Levenshulme is an urban area of the City of Manchester, in North West England. It borders Fallowfield, Longsight, Gorton, Burnage, Heaton Chapel and Reddish, and is approximately halfway between Stockport and Manchester city centre (approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) away) on the A6 road. The A6 bisects Levenshulme. The Manchester to London railway line passes through the district. Levenshulme railway station is served by local trains along this line.
Historically a part of Lancashire, Levenshulme is a former township and is predominantly residential with minimal industrial presence. The majority of its economy is generated via small retail establishments with a predominance of fast food shops, public houses and antique stores. It has a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic population and in the 2001 census it was determined that the population was 12,691.
The very early history is so obscure as to be virtually non-existent. Many of the nearby suburbs, such as Withington, Didsbury, Gorton etc., had a history of developing as villages, but for some reason Levenshulme did not. It has had several names over the millennia (according to East Lancashire expert Eilert Ekwall), including: in 1246 it was called "de Lewyneshulm", in 1322 "Levensholme" and in 1587 it was called "Lensom". The name itself is derived from a possessive version of a person's name, "Leofwine's" and "holm", a Viking term meaning island (usually in a lake or river). "Lywenshulme" also is referred to in the 1322 survey of Manchester and Collegiate Church charters refer to "Leysholme" (1556), "Lensholme" (1578) and "Lentsholme" (1635). The "Hulme" element is common in Manchester, and was pronounced "Oom", hence Levenshulme was traditionally "Levenzoom" to the residents.

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Loughton
Coordinates: 51°38′58″N 0°04′25″E / 51.6494°N 0.0735°E / 51.6494; 0.0735
Loughton ( /ˈlaʊtən/) is a town and civil parish in the Epping Forest district of Essex. It is located between 11 and 13 miles (21 km) north east of Charing Cross in London, south of the M25 and west of the M11 motorway and has boundaries with Chingford, Waltham Abbey, Theydon Bois, Chigwell and Buckhurst Hill. Loughton includes three conservation areas and there are 56 listed buildings in the town, together with a further 50 locally listed.
The parish of Loughton covers an area of about 3,724 acres (15 km²), of which over 1,300 acres (5 km²) are part of Epping Forest. The ancient parish contained over 3,900 acres (16 km²), but in 1996 some parts of the south of the old parish were transferred to Buckhurst Hill parish, and other small portions to Chigwell and Theydon Bois. At the time of the 2001 census Loughton had a population of 30,340. It is the most populous civil parish in the Epping Forest district, and within Essex it is the second most populous civil parish (after Canvey Island) and the second largest in area.

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Mac (Birmingham)
mac (formerly Midlands Arts Centre) is a non-profit arts centre situated in Cannon Hill Park, Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. It was established in 1962 and is registered as an educational charity which host plays, concerts and films shows; and holds art exhibitions, music classes, and workshops for all ages.
The centre re-opened in May 2010 after a £15m facelift. It has four performance auditoria, rehearsal and media studios, a cinema and art gallery.
The idea for an arts centre in Cannon Hill Park was the result of a meeting between local residents Mollie Randle, her husband, theatre writer and director John English and local politician Frank Price in the late 1950s. Eventually 8.6 acres of land in Cannon Hill Park was made available by Birmingham City Council in 1962 for this purpose. It also housed the Cannon Hill Puppet Theatre under John M. Blundall.
In 1965 director Mike Leigh went to work at the theatre and had the opportunity to start experimenting with the idea that writing and rehearsing could potentially be part of the same process. Between 1972 and 1987 it was the home of the Birmingham Youth Theatre, a company aimed at encouraging and nurturing talent amongst people aged 15 to 23 in the wider community. This company was founded by local teacher Derek Nicholls, who later became Director of the MAC. Success stories from the youth theatre include Adrian Lester and Andrew Tiernan.

wn.com/Mac_(Birmingham)
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British left-wingpolitical and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s.
The longest serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930–60). The current editor is Jason Cowley, who assumed the post at the end of September 2008. In the 29 May 2006 issue, then-editor John Kampfner stated that the New Statesman remained "true to its heritage of radical politics". The magazine is committed to "development, human rights and the environment, global issues the mainstream press often ignores".
Historically, the magazine was sometimes affectionately referred to as "The Staggers" because of crises in funding, ownership and circulation. The nickname is now used as the title of its rolling politics blog. Its current writers and columnists include Mehdi Hasan, Will Self, David Blanchflower, John Gray and Richard Mabey. The New Statesman had a certified average circulation of 23,909 in 2011, 17,471 of which were paid copies. Traffic to the magazine's relaunched website recently reached a record high. In the first quarter of 2012, monthly unique visitors to newstatesman.com exceeded 800,000, an increase of 231 per cent since the fourth quarter of 2009, when the site was previously relaunched.

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Singapore
Singapore (ⁱ/ˈsɪŋəpɔər/ SI-ngə-pohr), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, 137 kilometres (85 mi) north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the Singapore Strait to its south. Singapore is highly urbanised but almost half of the country is covered by greenery. More land is being created for development through land reclamation.

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Stratford-upon-Avon
Coordinates: 52°11′24″N 1°42′36″W / 52.19°N 1.710°W / 52.19; -1.710
Stratford-upon-Avon ( /ˌstrætfəd əpɒn ˈeɪvən/) is a market town and civil parish in south Warwickshire, England. It lies on the River Avon, 22 miles (35 km) south east of Birmingham and 8 miles (13 km) south west of Warwick. It is the largest and most populous town of the District of Stratford-on-Avon, which uses the term "on" to indicate that it covers a much larger area than the town itself. Four electoral wards make up the urban town of Stratford; Alveston, Avenue and New Town, Mount Pleasant and Guild and Hathaway. The estimated total population for those wards in 2007 was 25,505.
The town is a popular tourist destination owing to its status as birthplace of the playwright and poet William Shakespeare, receiving about three million visitors a year from all over the world. The Royal Shakespeare Company resides in Stratford's Royal Shakespeare Theatre, one of Britain's most important cultural venues.
Stratford has Anglo-Saxon origins, and grew up as a market town in medieval times. The original charters of the town were granted in 1196, making Stratford officially over 800 years old. The name is a fusion of the Old English strǣt, meaning "street", and ford, meaning that a Roman road forded the River Avon at the site of the town.

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Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival (Italian Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia) is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the Lido, Venice, Italy. Screenings take place in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi and in other venues nearby. It is one of the world's most prestigious film festivals and is part of the Venice Biennale (Italian Biennale di Venezia), for over a century one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world (founded in 1895). It is known world-wide for the International Film Festival, the International Art Exhibition and the International Architecture Exhibition, and continues the great tradition of the Festival of Contemporary Music, the Theatre Festival, now flanked by the Festival of Contemporary Dance.

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Welwyn Garden City
Coordinates: 51°48′22″N 0°11′36″W / 51.8062°N 0.1932°W / 51.8062; -0.1932
Welwyn Garden City ( /ˈwɛlɪn/) is a town within the Welwyn Hatfield borough of Hertfordshire, England. It is located approximately 20 miles (32 km) from Kings Cross. Welwyn Garden City was the second garden city in England (founded 1920) and one of the first new towns (designated 1948).
It is unique in being both a garden city and a new town and exemplifies the physical, social and cultural planning ideals of the periods in which it was built. Because of its historical importance it attracts visitors from around the world.
Welwyn Garden City was founded by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the 1920s following his previous experiment in Letchworth Garden City. Howard had called for the creation of planned towns that were to combine the benefits of the city and the countryside and to avoid the disadvantages of both. The Garden Cities and Town Planning Association had defined a garden city as
"a town designed for healthy living and industry of a size that makes possible a full measure of social life but not larger, surrounded by a rural belt; the whole of the land being in public ownership, or held in trust for the community"

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Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami (Persian: عباس کیارستمی ‎ Abbās Kiyārostamī; born 22 June 1940) is an internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active filmmaker since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (1987–94), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).
Kiarostami has worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director and producer and has designed credit titles and publicity material. He is also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He is part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi. These filmmakers share many common techniques including the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.

wn.com/Abbas_Kiarostami
Alan Parker
Sir Alan William Parker, CBE (born 14 February 1944) is an English film director, producer, writer and actor. He has been active in both the British cinema and American cinema and was a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain.
Parker was born into a working class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He attended Dame Alice Owen's School. Parker started out as a copywriter for advertising agencies in the 1960s and 1970s and later began to write his own television commercial scripts. His most celebrated and enduring advertising work was when he worked for famed London agency Collett Dickenson Pearce where he directed many award winning commercials, including the famous Cinzano vermouth advertisement, starring Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, shown in the UK.
His film career began through his association with producer David Puttnam, now Lord Puttnam, when he wrote the screenplay for the feature Melody (1971). Puttnam would later produce a number of Parker's films including Midnight Express (1978). This was a highly controversial film set in a Turkish prison that was lauded by critics and ended up earning a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Parker. He was later nominated for Best Director with Mississippi Burning (1988).

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Alison Steadman
Alison Steadman OBE (born 26 August 1946) is an English actress. She established her career with roles such as Beverley in Abigail's Party and Candice Marie in Nuts in May for the director Mike Leigh, to whom she was once married. In addition to her stage and radio work, she has had lead roles in The Singing Detective, Pride and Prejudice and Gavin & Stacey. In 1992 she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for her role as Mari in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.
Steadman was born in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, the youngest of three sisters, the daughter of Marjorie (née Evans), who died of cancer, and George Percival Steadman, who worked for Plessey, an electronics firm, as a production controller.
Steadman was educated at Childwall Valley High School for Girls, a state grammar school in the Liverpool suburb of Childwall, followed by East 15 Acting School, to which she secured a place in the autumn of 1966, where she first met Mike Leigh, during her second year.
Having left the East 15 Acting School in Loughton, Steadman worked in various regional repertory theatres, starting at Lincoln, where her first role was that of the seductive schoolgirl Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She created the role of the monstrous Beverly in Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, which she reprised with the original cast on television. Steadman also appeared in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Hotel Paradiso, and others in locations as diverse as the Royal Court, the Theatre Royal,^{[disambiguation needed ]} the Old Vic, the Hampstead Theatre, the Nottingham Playhouse, the Everyman Liverpool and the National Theatre. She starred as Elmire in the 1983 RSC production of Molière's Tartuffe, which was adapted for BBC television.^{[citation needed]} In 2010, Steadman was cast as Madame Arcati in a revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, which was scheduled for a national tour from November 2010 to March 2011.

wn.com/Alison_Steadman
Allan Corduner
Allan Corduner (born 2 April 1950) is an English actor.
Corduner grew up in a secular Jewish home in North London with his mother, father and a younger brother. His mother had escaped to England from Nazi Germany with her family in 1938. His father was born in Helsinki, Finland of a Finnish mother and a Russian father of Sephardic Jewish ancestry, although his father's family later moved to Stockholm, Sweden. Corduner's parents, too, first settled in Stockholm, but the family moved to London when Corduner was one year old. Interest in arts and music was always encouraged at home, and Corduner's early ambition was to become either an orchestra conductor or a concert pianist. He attended University College School in Hampstead, London NW3. Although Corduner developed into a very skilled jazz and classical pianist, musical aspirations had taken second place by the time he went to study at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Corduner is a character actor who has worked extensively in theatre in London's West End and on Broadway, television as well as in film. He has also appeared in several BBC Radio 4 plays including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Insignificance. His voice is familiar to listeners of audio books such as The Book Thief. Recent TV appearances include Exile with John Simm, We'll Take Manhattan for BBC4, and ITV's Midsomer Murders. This summer Corduner will start filming Da Vinci's Demons playing Verrocchio.

wn.com/Allan_Corduner
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Russian: Андре́й Арсе́ньевич Тарко́вский; April 4, 1932 – December 29, 1986) was a Soviet and Russian filmmaker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director, widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century.
Tarkovsky's films include Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker. He directed the first five of his seven feature films in the Soviet Union; his last two films were produced in Italy and Sweden, respectively. They are characterized by spirituality and metaphysical themes, long takes, lack of conventional dramatic structure and plot, and distinctively authored use of cinematography.
Film director Ingmar Bergman said of Tarkovsky:
Tarkovsky was born in the village of Zavrazhye in Ivanovo Oblast, the son of poet and translator Arseny Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, native of Kirovohrad, Ukraine, and Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

wn.com/Andrei_Tarkovsky
Andrew Niccol
Andrew M. Niccol (born 10 June 1964) is a New Zealand screenwriter, producer, and director. He wrote and directed Gattaca, S1m0ne, In Time, and Lord of War. He also wrote and co-produced The Truman Show, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 1999 and won a BAFTA award for Best Screenplay. Many of his films, such as Gattaca, S1m0ne, and The Truman Show, view societal or political issues through a fantasy-science fiction lens. Lord of War, however, is a contemporary, matter-of-fact exploration of gunrunning.
Niccol was born in Paraparaumu, New Zealand, and grew up in Auckland, where he attended Auckland Grammar School. He left New Zealand at age 21 and began directing TV ads in London. During production of S1m0ne, he met model Rachel Roberts, with whom he has two children, Jack (born 2003) and Ava (born 2008).

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André Téchiné
André Téchiné (born 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen (Tarn-et-Garonne) in France), is a French screenwriter and film director. He has had a long and distinguished career that places him among the best post-New Wave French film directors.
He belongs to a second generation of French film critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma who followed François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and others from criticism into film-making. Téchiné is noted for his elegant and emotionally charged films that often delve into the complexities of human condition and emotions.
One of the trademarks of his filmography is the lyrical examination of human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way, as can be seen in his most acclaimed films: My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds (1994).
André Téchiné was born on 13 March 1943 at Valence-d'Agen, a small town in the Midi-Pyrénées region, department of Tarn-et-Garonne, France. His family, of Spanish ancestry, owned a small business making agricultural equipment. He grew up in the south west French country side and in his adolescence acquired a passion for films. From 1952 to 1959 he went to a Catholic boarding school in Montauban. He was allowed to leave the school only on Sunday afternoons when he would go to the cinema, although he often had to return before the screening ended. From 1959 he attended a secular state school, which exposed him to a different culture, with Marxist teachers, a cine club and a film magazine, La Plume et l'écran, to which he contributed. "Films were my only opening to the world," Téchiné explained in an interview. "They were my only possibility of escaping my family environment and my boarding school. It was probably dangerous because, through movies, I learned how the world works and how human relations work. But it was magical, and I was determined to follow the thread of that magic."

wn.com/André_Téchiné
Andy Serkis
Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English film actor, director and author.
He is popularly known for playing through motion capture to animate and voice computer-generated characters: Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and its upcoming prequel The Hobbit, King Kong in the eponymous 2005 film, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.
Andrew also earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of Ian Brady in the British television film Longford. Serkis's motion captured work have been critically acclaimed, especially as Gollum for which he earned several award nominations, becoming the first motion captured actor to win a Empire Award, a Saturn Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Serkis, one of five children, was born and brought up in Ruislip Manor in west London. His mother, Lylie (née Weech), was English and taught disabled children; his father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi gynaecologist of Armenian ethnicity. His ancestors' original surname had been "Sarkisian".

wn.com/Andy_Serkis
Ang Lee
Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; Pinyin: Lǐ Ān; born October 23, 1954) is a Taiwanese-American film director. Lee has directed a diverse set of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), Hulk (2003), and Brokeback Mountain (2005), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director. He is the first person of Asian descent to win the Best Director Oscar.
Ang Lee was born in the town of Chaochou in Pingtung, a southern agricultural county in Taiwan. He grew up in a household that put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics. Both of Lee's parents moved to Taiwan from China following the Chinese Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Lee's father, a native of Jiangxi Province in southern China, imbued his children with studying Chinese culture and art, especially calligraphy.
Lee studied in the National Tainan First Senior High School where his father was the principal. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College/University Entrance Examination, the only route to a university education in Taiwan. But after failing the Exam twice, to the disappointment of his father, he entered a three-year college, National Arts School (now reorganized and expanded as National Taiwan University of Arts) and graduated in 1975. His father had wanted him to become a professor, but he had become interested in drama and the arts at college. This early frustration set his career on the path of performance art. Seeing Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring (1960) was a formative experience for him.

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Anthony Minghella
Anthony Minghella, CBE (6 January 1954 – 18 March 2008) was an English film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was Chairman of the Board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007.
He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The English Patient (1996), which also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the BAFTA Award for Best Film and Golden Globe Award for Best Director.
Minghella was born in Ryde, Isle of Wight, the son of Gloria (née Arcari) and Edward Minghella, ice cream factory owners. His father was an Italian immigrant and his mother was born in Leeds to an Italian family; her ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in the Lazio region of central Italy.
Minghella attended Sandown Grammar School and St. John's, Portsmouth. He graduated from the University of Hull, where he completed undergraduate and postgraduate courses, but eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis.^{[citation needed]}
His first piece of produced work was a 1975 stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper and it was his 1985 piece Whale Music that kickstarted his career. He made his directorial debut with a double bill of Samuel Beckett's Play and Happy Days. His first feature film as a director was A Little Like Drowning in 1978.

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Antony Sher
Sir Antony Sher, KBE (born 14 June 1949) is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter.
Sher was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of Margery and Emmanuel Sher, who worked in business. He grew up in the suburb of Sea Point and is a cousin of the playwright Ronald Harwood. Sher, however, has worked mainly in the United Kingdom and is now a British citizen.
In 1968, after completing his compulsory military service, he left for London to audition at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969 to 1971. After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982.
In the 1970s Sher was part of an astonishing group of young actors and writers working at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. It consisted of the likes of writers Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale and fellow actors Bernard Hill, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve and Jonathan Pryce. Sher summed up the work of the company with the phrase "Anarchy ruled." At the Royal Shakespeare Company he took the title role in Tartuffe and played the Fool in King Lear before his big breakthrough in 1984, when he played the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III. This won him the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award. Since then he has played the lead in such productions as Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, Stanley and Macbeth. He also played Johnnie in Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, Iago in Othello, Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

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Baz Luhrmann
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann (/ˈbæz ˈlʊərmən/; born 17 September 1962) is an Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, which includes his films Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!. In 2008, he released his film Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.
Luhrmann was born in Sydney, Australia to a mother who was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner, and Leonard Luhrmann, a farmer. He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in northern New South Wales, where his father ran a petrol station and a movie theatre, both of which would influence his son's film-making career. He attended St. Joseph's Hasting Regional School, Port Macquarie 1975-1978 and Balgowlah Boys Campus. He attended Year 11 at Narrabeen Sports High School in Sydney, performing in the school's version of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. His nickname was given to him because of a perceived resemblance to the character Basil Brush.^{[citation needed]} Luhrmann first auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1980 but didn't get into the prestigious drama school. He successfully auditioned again two years later, starting the three-year acting course in 1983. He graduated from NIDA in 1985, alongside Sonia Todd, Catherine McClements and Justin Monjo.

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Bertrand Tavernier
Bertrand Tavernier (born 25 April 1941) is a French director, screenwriter, actor, and producer.
Tavernier was born in Lyon, the son of Geneviève (née Dumond) and René Tavernier, a publicist and writer, several years president of the French PEN club. Tavernier wanted to become a filmmaker since the age of thirteen or fourteen years old. He claims that his cinematic influences include filmmakers John Ford, William Wellman, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and Jacques Becker. The first film director with whom he worked was Jean-Pierre Melville. Later, his first film (The Clockmaker, 1974) won the Prix Louis Delluc and the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize award at the 24th Berlin International Film Festival.
His early work was dominated by mysteries, but his later work is characterized by a more overt social commentary, highlighting his pacifism (Life and Nothing But, Capitaine Conan) and presenting a critical picture of contemporary French society (Ça commence aujourd'hui, Histoires de vies brisées : les double-peine de Lyon).

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Brenda Blethyn
Brenda Anne Blethyn, OBE (born Brenda Anne Bottle; 20 February 1946) is an English actress who has worked in theatre, television and film. Blethyn has received two Academy Award nominations, two SAG Award nominations, two Emmy Award nominations and three Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one. In addition, she has won a BAFTA, an Empire Award and a Golden Lion, and has earned a Theatre World Award and both a Critics' Circle Theatre Award and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for her theatrical work.
Born into a working class home, Blethyn pursued an administrative career until her early 30s before enrolling in the Guildford School of Acting after the dissolution of her marriage in 1973. She subsequently joined the Royal National Theatre and received credits for her performances in Troilus and Cressida (1976) and Mysteries (1979). In 1981, Blethyn earned her first critical acclaim for Steaming.
In 1980, Blethyn made her television debut in Mike Leigh's film Grown-Ups; then, after a modest number of guest spots in several productions, in the mid-1980s she garnered leading roles in the short-living sitcoms Chance in a Million and The Labours of Erica. Having followed her big screen debut with smaller supporting roles in films such as The Witches (1990) and A River Runs Through It (1992), she made her real cinema breakthrough with her role in the 1996 dramedy Secrets & Lies, for which she received rave reviews.

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Brid Brennan
Brid Brennan (born 1955) is an Irish actress, best known for her theatre work. She was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Brennan created the role of Agnes Mundy in Brian Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa. She played the role in the original Dublin, West End and Broadway productions, winning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She reprised her performance on screen in Noel Pearson's much acclaimed 1998 film version of the play starring Meryl Streep, for which Brennan won an Irish Film and Television Award.
In 1999, Brennan played Maisie Madigan in Noel Pearson's production of Juno and the Paycock at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin and starred as Sister Aloysius in the Abbey Theatre Dublin production of Doubt.
She has received two Olivier Award nominations: for Rutherford and Son at the National Theatre and for The Little Foxes at the Donmar Warehouse.
She has also played roles in productions of Dallas Streetman, Woman and Scarecrow, By the Bog of Cats, Pillars of the Community, Man Beast and Virtue, Macbeth, La Lupa, Bliss, Bone Bailegangaire, A Kind of Alaska, Intemperance, Smelling a Rat, The Playboy of the Western World and Holy Days.

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Charlie Kaufman
Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman (born November 19, 1958) is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Between 1983 and 1984, Kaufman wrote comedic articles and spoofs on spec for National Lampoon, along with colleague and friend Paul Proch. His work included parodies of Kurt Vonnegut and the X-Men. After moving to Los Angeles, Kaufman got his start in television by writing two episodes for Chris Elliott's Get a Life during the 1991-92 season. During the 1993-94 season, Kaufman worked on Fox's sketch comedy show The Edge. He later worked as a writer for Ned and Stacey and The Dana Carvey Show.
He first came to mainstream notice as the writer of Being John Malkovich (directed by Spike Jonze), earning an Oscar nomination for his effort and winning a BAFTA. He also wrote Human Nature, which was directed by Michel Gondry, and then worked with Jonze again as the screenwriter for Adaptation., which earned him another Oscar nomination and his second BAFTA. Adaptation. featured a "Charlie Kaufman" character who is a heavily fictionalized version of the screenwriter and who has an "identical twin brother", Donald, a sell-out screenwriter reflecting Kaufman's anxieties about Hollywood. The DVD edition of Adaptation. contains a filmography which lists Donald Kaufman as having written the screenplay for the movie. The credits of the film close with the words "in loving memory of Donald Kaufman".

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Claire Skinner
Claire L. Skinner (born 1965) is an English actress, known in the United Kingdom for her television career.
Born and brought up in Hemel Hempstead, Skinner, the youngest daughter of a shopkeeper and an Irish-born secretary, was shy as a child. Her dream was to be an actress and she immersed herself in her ambition. She acted all the time, neglecting school work, at Cavendish School in Hemel Hempstead, and "barely scraped through [her] A-levels". She went on to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Her first role was in Hanky Park, by Walter Greenwood at the Oldham Repertory Theatre, which she describes as a "really traditional start."
Skinner is known for her role as Clare in the British TV comedy Life Begins and more recently as Sue in the BBC's award-winning sitcom Outnumbered. For many years, she has preferred theatre to screen roles because she's been disappointed with her TV projects ("apart from Mike Leigh's stuff"), "not just when you see the final thing, but also because it hasn't taken off."

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Coen brothers
Joel David Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) known together professionally as the Coen brothers, are American filmmakers. Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit.
The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.
Joel and Ethan Coen, of Jewish heritage, grew up in a Jewish community in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their father, Edward, was an economist at the University of Minnesota, and their mother, Rena, an art historian at St. Cloud State University.
When they were children, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering ("Zeimers"),^{[citation needed]} as the star. Their first attempt was a romp titled, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia, which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.

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Daniel Mays
Daniel Alan Mays (born 31 March 1978) is a British actor.
Born the third of four boys, Mays was raised in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, by his electrician father and bank cashier mother. He attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts before going on to win a place at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After graduating from RADA in 2000, Mays soon started appearing in a number of supporting roles ranging from a bit part in the BBC soap opera EastEnders in 2000 to playing a pilot in Jerry Bruckheimer's big-budget Pearl Harbor (2001). He was cast in the Mike Leigh film All or Nothing (2002) as Jason, a thug who abused his girlfriend, and also appeared in Leigh's next project, Vera Drake (2004), in which he played Sid, the protagonist's son. His performances for Leigh resulted in further offers of work.
One of Mays's most notable early roles was in the improvised BBC drama Rehab. Directed by acclaimed film maker Antonia Bird, Rehab was a drama about life inside a drug rehabilitation facility. He starred as Adam, a young heroin addict released from prison and sent directly to rehab. For his performance Mays was awarded the Best Actor award at the Palmare-Reims Television Festival in 2003.

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Danny Boyle
Daniel "Danny" Boyle (born 20 October 1956) is an English filmmaker and producer. He is best known for his work on films such as Slumdog Millionaire, Shallow Grave, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Trainspotting. For Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle won numerous awards in 2008, including the Academy Award for Best Director. Boyle was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2008 Austin Film Festival, where he also introduced that year's AFF Audience Award Winner Slumdog Millionaire. On 17 June 2010, it was announced that he will be the Artistic Director for the 2012 Olympic games opening ceremony.
Boyle was born on 20 October 1956 in Radcliffe, Lancashire, (now in the modern day metropolitan borough of Bury, Greater Manchester) into a working-class Irish Catholic family. His mother was from Ballinasloe in County Galway, and his father was born in England to an Irish family.
It was a very strict, Catholic family. I was an altar boy for eight years, I was supposed to be a priest and really, it was my mother's fondest wish that I would become one.

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Danny Rubin
Danny Rubin (b. 1957) is an American screenwriter, actor, lecturer, celebrity blogger, and most notably the screenwriter of the modern classic Groundhog Day. The title of the movie has now entered the vernacular to describe the experience of a day or even a limited event repeating. Rubin received a B.A. in biology from Brown University and a M.A. in radio, television, and film from Northwestern University. He has taught screenwriting at numerous universities and lectured on the topic at 20 academic conferences since 1995. Currently he holds the position of Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on Screenwriting at Harvard University. Rubin is married with two children.

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David Leland
David Leland (born 20 April 1947 in Cambridge, England) is a director, screenwriter and actor who came to international fame with his directorial debut Wish You Were Here in 1987.
After several small parts as actor he began his collaboration with British television director Alan Clarke in 1981. Their film Made in Britain was critically acclaimed and marked the beginning of the career of actor Tim Roth. Made in Britain won the Prix Italia (an international Television award) in 1984. In 1986 he wrote the screenplay for the thriller-drama Mona Lisa, featuring Bob Hoskins. This film was critically acclaimed and Leland earned nominations for the Golden Globe and the Writers Guild of America.
He then wrote Personal Services in 1986. It was directed by Terry Jones and was about Cynthia Payne, a real-life British madam who ran a private brothel. Julie Walters took the leading role. While Personal Services dealt with the adult life of Cynthia Payne, Leland's next film, Wish You Were Here, concerned her teenage years. This film was a success at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and it made the young British actress Emily Lloyd a star. It was awarded the FIPRESCI-Award at Cannes and the BAFTA for best screenplay.

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David Thewlis
David Thewlis (born David Wheeler; 20 March 1963) is an English actor of stage and screen. His most commercially successful role to date has been that of Remus Lupin, in the Harry Potter film series. Other notable performances include his work in the films Timeline (2003), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), The Omen (2006), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), London Boulevard (2010) and War Horse (2011). He made his name known in 1993 with his performance of Johnny in Naked – for which he won multiple awards – became known publicly for his performance of main antagonist King Einon in the 1996 film Dragonheart. He has also done voice work in the films James and the Giant Peach (1996) and The Miracle Maker (2000).
Thewlis, second of three children, was born David Wheeler in Blackpool, Lancashire, the son of Maureen (née Thewlis) and Alec Raymond Wheeler. Both of his parents worked at his father's shop, which sold toys in the summer and wallpaper and paint in the winter. As a teenager, he played in a rock band called QED, in which he, Cliff Ashcroft, Mark Fawl and Chris Swift wrote much of their own music and lyrics. QED played at some of the Blackpool hotels to earn money for equipment and their first recording session at Storm Studios in Blackpool. Later, Thewlis played lead guitar with a punk rock band called Door 66. As a musician he was "doing nicely, doing good" and did not want to be an actor. Thewlis was educated at Highfield High School (since renamed Highfield Humanities College), a state secondary school in Marton, Blackpool in North West England where his nickname, at least to his friends, was 'Sqwee'.

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Eddie Marsan
Edward Maurice Charles "Eddie" Marsan (born 1968) is an English actor, known for his roles in the films Gangster No. 1, Mission: Impossible III, Sixty Six, V for Vendetta, Hancock, Happy-Go-Lucky, Sherlock Holmes, and War Horse.
Marsan was born in Stepney, London to a working class family; his father was a lorry driver and his mother a school dinner lady and teacher's assistant. He was brought up in Bethnal Green and initially served an apprenticeship as a printer, before beginning his career in theatre, and moving to a television and film career. He trained at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, graduating in 1991.
Marsan's first television appearance was in 1992, as a "yob", in the London Weekend Television series The Piglet Files. One of his more significant earliest television appearances was in the popular mid-1990s BBC sitcom Game On as a bungling bank robber. Marsan went on to have roles in Casualty, The Bill, Kavanagh QC, Grange Hill, Silent Witness, Ultimate Force, and more.
Marsan has since branched out into numerous and varied film roles including work in the United States, and is achieving much success in Hollywood, most recently as the main villain in the 2008 superhero film Hancock alongside Will Smith and as Inspector Lestrade in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. His other movies include Sixty Six, Gangs of New York, 21 Grams, The Illusionist, V for Vendetta, Gangster No. 1, Miami Vice, Mission: Impossible III, I Want Candy, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky, Tyrannosaur, and Heartless.

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Edna Doré
Edna Doré, née Gorring, (born 1921) is a British actress. Doré is one of Britain's best known senior citizen actresses. She is known for her bit-part roles in situation comedies and for playing the character of Mo Butcher in the BBC soap opera EastEnders (1988–1990).
She began her career as a chorus girl in ENSA, then spent twenty years in repertory theatre before becoming a member of the National Theatre for ten years. She turned to television acting in 1960 and subsequently had parts in many successful series, including Dixon of Dock Green, Doctor in the House, The Liver Birds, Terry and June, Tenko, Z Cars, and Open All Hours.
In 1988, she starred in Mike Leigh's award winning film High Hopes, for which she received the award for Best Supporting Player at the 1989 European Film Awards. Here, she played Mrs. Bender, who suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.
In 1988, she was cast in the popular BBC soap opera EastEnders, where she played Mo Butcher, the battleaxe mother of Mike Reid's character, Frank Butcher. During her time in the show, she once again received wide acclaim for her portrayal of an elderly lady's descent into Alzheimer's disease. The story—about the effect that Alzheimer's has on the sufferer's family—had to be curtailed when Doré decided to leave the programme in 1990. The character was killed off at the end of 1992.

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Elizabeth Berrington
Elizabeth Berrington (born 3 August 1970) is an English actress, who has featured in British television series such as Waterloo Road, The Bill, The Office,Casualty, The Lakes and Rose and Maloney.
In 1999, she played Marie-Antoinette in Let Them Eat Cake, starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. In cinema, Berrington has featured in many popular films such as The Little Vampire and, more recently, Nanny McPhee with Emma Thompson, and In Bruges alongside Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. In 2008 and 2009, a she played Mel in Moving Wallpaper. Berrington also featured in the 1993 Mike Leigh film Naked and Leigh's Secrets and Lies (1996).
In 2009, Berrington and actress Shirley Henderson were the stars of the popular ITV drama May Contain Nuts she played Ffion, a snobbish suburban mother. Berrington also played Nicola, a nurse in the BBC Two comedy, Psychoville.
She also appeared as Food Technology teacher Ruby Fry in the BBC TV series Waterloo Road from 2009 to 2011, departing after two series on the show.

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Emir Kusturica
Emir Nemanja Kusturica (Serbian: Емир Немања Кустурица, Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [ěmiːr nɛ̌maɲa kǔsturitsa]); born 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo) is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician, recognized for several internationally acclaimed feature films. He is a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes (for When Father Was Away on Business and Underground), as well as being a Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Since the mid-2000s, Kusturica's primary residence is Drvengrad, a village in the Mokra Gora region of Serbia. He had portions of the historic village reconstructed for his film Life Is a Miracle.
Born to Murat Kusturica, a journalist employed at the Sarajevo's Secretariate of Information, and Senka Numankadić, a court secretary, Emir grew up as the only child of a secular family in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, then a constituent republic within Yugoslavia.
Emir was something of a delinquent while growing up in Sarajevo, according to his own account. Through his father's friendship with the well-known director Hajrudin "Šiba" Krvavac, 17-year-old Emir got a small part in Krvavac's 1972 Walter Defends Sarajevo, a partisan film funded by the Yugoslav state.

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Emma Amos (actress)
Emma Amos (born 18 August 1967 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire) is an English actress best known for playing Yvonne Sparrow in the last three series of time travel sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart alongside Nicholas Lyndhurst. She replaced original actress Michelle Holmes who held the role from 1993-1996. In 1992, she received much critical acclaim for her role of Sherbet Gravel in Philip Ridley's controversial stage play The Fastest Clock in the Universe.
In 1991, Emma landed a part in the British movie Buddy's Song. Designed as a vehicle for rising pop-talent Chesney Hawkes, the film also starred Roger Daltrey of rock band The Who as Terry, Buddy's dad. Emma was cast as Dawn, Terry's girlfriend but only featured in a few brief scenes. Emma's first notable TV role was in an episode of successful long-running sit-com Men Behaving Badly. She played the part of Mandy, the annoying girlfriend of Tony's brother in the episode "People Behaving Irritatingly".
Following a variety of similar supporting-part roles Emma eventually landed a starring role alongside Nicholas Lyndhurst in the time-travel sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart. Replacing Michelle Holmes mid-way through the series' 6 season run, Emma took on the role of time-travelling bigamist Gary Sparrow's 1990s wife, Yvonne. It was in the final three seasons that the character developed considerably, Emma's performance focusing on Yvonne's increasing success as a high-powered business woman. The show's creators also made the character a far sexier proposition than previously. She was often dressed in smart business suits with short skirts or seen exercising in tight-fitting lycra. In one notable episode, "The 'Ouses In Between", Emma took on the additional role of a music hall singer when husband Gary's time-travelling takes him further back than normal to Victorian times and an encounter with Jack the Ripper.

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Eric Richard
Eric Richard (born Eric Smith, 27 June 1940) is an English actor.
His theatre work includes plays at the Royal Court Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, as well as seasons with the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Sheffield Crucible Theatre and Paines Plough. In 2001 he appeared as Ebeneezer Scrooge in a production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, London.
He is perhaps best known for his role as Desk Sergeant Bob Cryer in the long running ITV drama The Bill, which he portrayed for 20 years from the show's inception in 1984, although his television work has also included Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, Home Sweet Home, Made in Britain, Open All Hours, Games Without Frontiers, P'Tang Yang Kipperbang, Shoestring, and Holby City.
In 2010 it was announced that Richard was to appear in the stage version of Lark Rise to Candleford which is currently on a nationwide tour.

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Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).

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Fernando Solanas
Fernando Ezequiel 'Pino' Solanas (born 16 February 1936, Olivos, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentine film director, screenwriter and politician. His films include La hora de los hornos (1968), Tangos: el exilio de Gardel (1985), Sur (1988), El viaje (1992), La nube (1998) and Memorias del saqueo (2004), among many others.
Solanas studied theatre, music and law. In 1962, he directed his first short feature Seguir andando and in 1968 he covertly produced and directed his first long feature film La Hora de los Hornos, a documentary on neo-colonialism and violence in Latin America. The film won several international awards and was screened around the world. Solanas has won the Special Jury Award and the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Director Palme at the Cannes Film Festival. He was awarded a special Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival. He collaborated with the great tango composer and musician Ástor Piazzolla on the soundtracks for various movies^{[citation needed]}.

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Flann O'Brien
Brian O'Nolan (Irish: Brian Ó Nualláin) (5 October 1911 – 1 April 1966) was an Irish novelist, playwright and satirist regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is best known for English language novels such as At Swim-Two-Birds, and The Third Policeman (written under the nom de plume Flann O'Brien) as well as many satirical columns in The Irish Times and an Irish language novel An Béal Bocht (written under the name Myles na gCopaleen).
O'Nolan wrote prodigiously during his years as a student at University College Dublin where he was an active, and controversial, member of the well known Literary and Historical Society. He contributed to the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne (Fair Play) under various guises, in particular the pseudonym Brother Barnabas. Significantly, he composed a story during this same period entitled "Scenes in a Novel (probably posthumous) by Brother Barnabas", which anticipates many of the ideas and themes later to be found in his novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. In it, the putative author of the story finds himself in riotous conflict with his characters, who are determined to follow their own paths regardless of the author's design. For example, the villain of the story, one Carruthers McDaid, intended by the author as the lowest form of scoundrel, "meant to sink slowly to absolutely the last extremities of human degradation", instead ekes out a modest living selling cats to elderly ladies and becomes a covert churchgoer without the author's consent. Meanwhile, the story's hero, Shaun Svoolish, chooses a comfortable, bourgeois life rather than romance and heroics:

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Gary Oldman
Gary Leonard Oldman (born 21 March 1958) is an English screen and stage actor, filmmaker and musician, who is the highest-grossing actor in the history of film. A successful theatre actor and former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Oldman gained mainstream recognition from the early 1980s to early 1990s for his portrayals of morally ambiguous characters in films including Meantime, Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, The Firm, State of Grace, JFK and Dracula. He became a popular portrayer of villains by the mid 1990s, playing the antagonist of True Romance, Léon, The Fifth Element, Air Force One and The Contender. Since the millenium Oldman has starred in such films as the Harry Potter series, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Aside from film acting, he has starred in television shows like Knots Landing and Friends, voiced various characters in the Call of Duty video game series, and wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, a film partially based on his own childhood.

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George Grosz
George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933.
George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany, the son of a pub owner. His parents were devoutly Lutheran. Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, where his mother became the keeper of the local Hussar's Officers' mess after his father died in 1901. At the urging of his cousin, the young Grosz began attending a weekly drawing class taught by a local painter named Grot. Grosz developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of the drinking scenes of Eduard Grutzner, and by drawing imaginary battle scenes. From 1909–1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael Wehle, and Oskar Schindler. He subsequently studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik.

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Giuseppe Tornatore
Giuseppe Tornatore (born 27 May 1956) is an Italian film director and screenwriter.
Born in Bagheria near Palermo, Tornatore developed an interest in acting and the theatre from at least the age of 16 and put on works by Luigi Pirandello and Eduardo De Filippo.
He worked initially as a freelance photographer. Then, switching to cinema, he made his debut with Le minoranze etniche in Sicilia (The Ethnic Minorities in Sicily), a collaborative documentary which won a Salerno Festival prize. He then worked for RAI before releasing his first full-length film, Il Camorrista, in 1985. This evoked a positive response from audience and critics alike and Tornatore was awarded the Silver Ribbon for best new director.
Tornatore's best known screen work was released in 1988: Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, a film narrating the life of a successful film director who has returned to his native town in Sicily for the funeral of his mentor. This obtained worldwide success and won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Subsequently Tornatore released several other films cementing his place in film history.

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Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Antonia Fraser in 1980.

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Harold Ramis
Harold Allen Ramis (born November 21, 1944) is an American actor, director, and writer, specializing in comedy. His best-known film acting roles are as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters (1984) and Russell Ziskey in Stripes (1981), both of which he also co-wrote. As a writer/director, his films include the comedies Caddyshack (1980), Groundhog Day (1993), and Analyze This (1999). Ramis was the original head writer of the television series SCTV (in which he also performed), and one of three screenwriters for the film National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).
Ramis was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Ruth (née Cokee) and Nathan Ramis, shopkeepers who owned the store Ace Food & Liquor Mart on the city's far North Side. He had a Jewish upbringing, although in his adult life he does not practice any organized religion. He graduated from Nicholas Senn High School in Chicago, and, in 1966, from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was a member of the Alpha Xi chapter of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.^{[citation needed]}

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Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma (born December 28, 1951) is a British-Dutch writer and academic. Much of his work focuses on the culture of Asia, particularly that of 20th-century Japan.
He was born in The Hague, the Netherlands, to a Dutch father and British mother. He studied Chinese literature at Leiden University, and then Japanese film at Nihon University in Tokyo. He has held a number of editorial and academic positions, and has contributed numerous articles to The New York Review of Books. He has been noted as a "well-regarded European intellectual."
In 2000 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture – Neoromanticism of writers in exile – in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, The Netherlands. He has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C and St Antony's College, Oxford. In 2003 he became Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism at Bard College, New York.
Since 2005 he has resided in New York, USA.
In 2008 Buruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe."

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Imelda Staunton
Imelda Mary Philomena Bernadette Staunton, OBE (born 9 January 1956) is an English actress. She is perhaps best known for her performances in the British comedy television series Up the Garden Path, the Harry Potter film series (in which she plays Professor Dolores Jane Umbridge) and Vera Drake. She drew critical acclaim as Vera Drake, earning her a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a number of wins including the BAFTA and Venice Film Festival Awards for best actress in a leading role.
Staunton was born in Archway, North London, the only child of Bridie (née McNicholas), a hairdresser, and Joseph Staunton, a road-worker and labourer. The family lived over Staunton's mother's hair dressing salon while Staunton’s father worked on the roads. Both of her parents were first-generation Catholic immigrants from County Mayo, Ireland, with her father coming from Ballyvary and her mother from Bohola. Staunton's mother was a musician who could not read music, but could master almost any tune by ear on the accordion or fiddle and had played in Irish showbands.

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James Corden
James Kimberley Corden (born 22 August 1978) is an English actor, television writer, producer and presenter. He is co-creator and star of BBC comedy shows Gavin & Stacey and Horne & Corden, and acted in the 2009 film Lesbian Vampire Killers. He attracted attention for his performance in the lead role in the award-winning comedy play One Man, Two Guvnors, which transferred from the National Theater to the West End and then to Broadway.
Corden was born to Malcolm and Margaret Corden in Hillingdon, Greater London, and grew up in Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire. He has an older sister, Andrea Henry, and a younger sister, Ruth Corden.
Corden obtained his first part at eighteen years old in the musical Martin Guerre. He then starred in the British television series Fat Friends as Jamie Rymer, and played Gareth Jones in the series Boyz Unlimited. His television work includes a credited minor role as Razor #1 in Renford Rejects (Series 1 Episode 2, 1998), a role playing a bookish student in Teachers (Series 1, 2000) and he also made a guest appearance in Little Britain. Corden's film credits include Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? (1999) and Mike Leigh's All or Nothing (2002).

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Jane Horrocks
Barbara Jane Horrocks (born 18 January 1964) is an English voice, stage, screen and television actress, voice artist, musician, and singer. She is best known for her role as "Bubble" in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous as well as her distinctive voice and strong Lancashire accent.
Horrocks, the youngest of three children, was born in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, England, the daughter of Barbara (née Ashworth), a hospital worker, and John Horrocks, a sales representative. She attended Balladen County Primary School and later trained at the Oldham College and subsequently at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with Imogen Stubbs and Ralph Fiennes, and began her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She drew critical notice for her performance in the film Life Is Sweet (1991), followed by her award-winning performance in the West End play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice in which she sang all the songs. Horrocks became a name with the role of Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), in which she also played Katy Grin in the last two seasons.

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Janine Duvitski
Janine Duvitski (born Christine Janine Drzewicki; June 1952) is an English actress, known for her roles as Jane Edwards in Waiting for God and Pippa Trench in One Foot in the Grave. She also created and played the role of Angela in Mike Leigh's play Abigail's Party.
Duvitski was born in Lancaster, Lancashire. Her father was Polish. She trained at the East 15 Acting School in London. She has four children, John, Albert and Edith plus actress Ruby Bentall with her actor husband Paul Bentall.
Duvitski's many television credits include playing Jacqueline Stewart in Benidorm, One Foot in the Grave, Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills, Brush Strokes, Minder, Midsomer Murders, My Family, Man About the House, The Georgian House, The Black Stuff (TV play) by Alan Bleasdale , The Knowledge, Waiting for God and Z-Cars. She was also in the 1994 film The Madness of King George. Her most recent prominent role is as Eve in another BBC sitcom, The Worst Week of My Life.
She also had a small role opposite Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasence in Dracula (1979).

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Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir (French pronunciation: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. His pictures Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962). Jean Renoir was ranked by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of critics as the fourth greatest director of all time.
Renoir was born in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. He was the second son of Aline Charigot and the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He was also the brother of Pierre Renoir, a noted French stage and film actor; the uncle of Claude Renoir, a cinematographer; and the father of Alain Renoir^(fr), professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Jew
The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudim Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws, and Israel's Law of Return states: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh." Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews achieved political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora. A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.

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Jim Broadbent
James "Jim" Broadbent (born 24 May 1949) is an English theatre, film, and television actor. He is known for his roles in Iris, Moulin Rouge!, Topsy-Turvy, Hot Fuzz, and Bridget Jones' Diary. He also appears in the Harry Potter films as Horace Slughorn.
Broadbent was born in Holton cum Beckering, the son of Doreen "Dee" Broadbent (née Findlay), a sculptor, and Roy Laverick Broadbent, an artist, sculptor, interior designer, and furniture maker who turned a former church into a theatre named after him. Broadbent's parents were both amateur actors who co-founded the Holton Players acting troupe at Holton cum Beckering; the two were described by the BBC as conscientious objectors who "worked the land" rather than participate in World War II. He had a twin sister who died at birth. Broadbent was educated at Leighton Park School, a Quaker school in Reading, and briefly attended art college before transferring to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from which he graduated in 1972.
Broadbent's early stagework included a number of productions for The National Theatre of Brent, as the downtrodden assistant Wallace to Patrick Barlow's self-important actor/manager character Desmond Olivier Dingle. Broadbent and Barlow played many male and female character roles in comically less-than-epic tellings of historical and religious stories such as The Messiah, The Complete Guide to Sex, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Revolution!!, and All The World's A Globe. These were hits at the Edinburgh Fringe, in London, and on tour. Later stage work included the original productions of Kafka's Dick (1986) and Our Country's Good (1988) at the Royal Court Theatre and work for the Royal National Theatre including "The Government Inspector". Work on the stage with Mike Leigh includes Goosepimples and Ecstasy.

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John Boorman
John Boorman (born 18 January 1933) is a British filmmaker who is a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama.
Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey, England, the son of Ivy (née Chapman) and George Boorman. He was educated at the Salesian School in Chertsey, Surrey, even though his family was not Roman Catholic. He has directed a total of 22 movies.
Boorman first began by working as a drycleaner and journalist in the late 1950s. He ran the newsrooms at Southern Television in Southampton and Dover before moving into TV documentary filmmaking, eventually becoming the head of the BBC's Bristol-based Documentary Unit in 1962.
Capturing the interest of producer David Deutsch, he was offered the chance to direct a film aimed at repeating the success of A Hard Day's Night (directed by Richard Lester in 1964): Catch Us If You Can (1965) is about competing pop group Dave Clark Five. While not as successful commercially as Lester's film, it drew good reviews from distinguished critics such as Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell and smoothed Boorman's way into the film industry. Boorman was drawn to Hollywood for the opportunity to make larger-scale cinema and in Point Blank (1967), a powerful interpretation of a Richard Stark novel, brought a stranger's vision to the decaying fortress of Alcatraz and the proto-hippy world of San Francisco. Lee Marvin gave the then-unknown director his full support, telling MGM he deferred all his approvals on the project to Boorman.

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John Cassavetes
John Nicholas Cassavetes (in Greek: Γιάννης Νικόλαος Κασσαβέτης; December 9, 1929 – February 3, 1989) was an Greek-American actor, screenwriter and filmmaker. He acted in many Hollywood films, notably Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Cassevetes was also a pioneer of American independent film by writing and directing over a dozen movies, which he financed in part with his Hollywood paychecks, and which pioneered the use of improvisation and a realistic cinéma vérité style.
Cassavetes was born in New York as the son of Greek American Katherine Cassavetes (who was to feature in some of his films) and Greek immigrant Nicholas John Cassavetes. His early years were spent with his family in Greece; when he returned at age seven, he spoke no English. He grew up on Long Island, New York. He attended Port Washington High School from 1945 to 1947, participating in Port Weekly (the school paper), Red Domino (interclass play), football, and the Port Light (yearbook). Next to his photo on page 55 of his 1947 year book is written: "'Cassy' is always ready with a wisecrack, but he does have a serious side. A 'sensational' personality. Drives his 'heap' all over." Cassavetes also attended high school at Blair Academy in New Jersey before spending a year at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, before transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After graduating in 1950, he continued acting in the theater, took small parts in films and began working on television in anthology series, such as Alcoa Theatre.

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Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Ann Bigelow (born November 27, 1951) is an American film director, film producer, screenwriter and television director. Her best-known films are the cult horror film Near Dark (1987), the surfer/bank robbery action picture Point Break (1991), the science fiction/film noir Strange Days (1995), the historical/mystery film The Weight of Water (2000) and the war drama The Hurt Locker (2008). The Hurt Locker won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture, won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and was nominated for the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Drama.
With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director. She also became the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director in 1995 for Strange Days.
In April 2010, Bigelow was named to the Time 100 list of most influential people of the year.
Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, United States, the only child of a paint factory manager and a librarian. Her early creative endeavors were as a student of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972. While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study scholarship program in New York City. Bigelow’s early work benefited from her apprenticeships with Vito Acconi, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner.

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Katrin Cartlidge
Katrin Cartlidge (15 May 1961 — 7 September 2002) was an English actress. She first appeared on screen as Lucy Collins in the Liverpool soap opera Brookside from 1982 to 1988 and later became well known for her film work with directors such as Mike Leigh and Lars von Trier.
Cartlidge was born in London to an English father and a German Jewish refugee mother.^{[citation needed]} She was educated at the Parliament Hill School for Girls in Camden.
Cartlidge died at age 41, due to complications from pneumonia and septicaemia, stemming from a pheochromocytoma.
Her work on Manchevski's Before the Rain, and on No Man's Land made her well known in the Balkans and Bosnia-Herzogovina. Sophie, in Mike Leigh's Naked, was her first leading role. Mike Leigh : " She took to the improvisation and character work instantly, easily and with extraordinary commitment and imagination. Other than in the Royal Court Young Peoples Theatre, she had had no formal training, but you would never have guessed it. (Drama Centre London turned her down, and that put her off). She often talked to me about [a] move into directing. I am in no doubt that we have lost not only one of our greatest actors but also one of the most interesting new directors of the future." Leigh and Cartlidge worked together twice more after Naked, on Career Girls, playing Hannah at both 20 and 30, and Topsy Turvy, playing a madame in the scene where Sullivan visits a Paris brothel.

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Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Charles Branagh (/ˈbrænə/ BRAN-ə; born 10 December 1960) is an actor and film director from Northern Ireland. He is best known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays including Henry V (1989) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello, Hamlet (1996) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006).
He has also starred in numerous other films and television series including Fortunes of War (1987), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Conspiracy (TV) (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (TV) (2005), Valkyrie (2008), Wallander (TV series) (2008–present), and My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Laurence Olivier (Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor); and directed such notable films as Dead Again (1991) (also starring), Swan Song (1992) (Academy Award nominated for Best Live Action Short Film), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) (also starring), The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), and the blockbuster action film Thor (2011).

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Les Blair
Leslie "Les" Blair (born 23 October 1941, Manchester, England, UK) is an English television, film and theatre director.
Gaining notoriety for his controversial mini-series Law And Order (shown in 1978 on BBC2), Blair has gone on to direct films characterised by their political and social awareness.
Blair currently teaches at the London Film School.

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Lesley Manville
Lesley Manville (born 12 March 1956) is an English actress of film, theatre and television. She frequently collaborates with director Mike Leigh, twice being named British Actress of the Year at the London Film Critics Circle Awards for her performances in the Mike Leigh films, All or Nothing and Another Year. She is also a BAFTA and Olivier award nominee.
Born in Brighton, Manville was brought up in Hove, East Sussex, one of three daughters of a taxicab driver. Training as a soprano singer from age 8, she twice became under-18 champion of Sussex. She began acting as a teenager, appearing in television series such as King Cinder. As a result, at age 15, she gained a place at the Italia Conti Stage School.
After turning down teacher Arlene Phillips' invitation to join her new dance troupe Hot Gossip, she was taught improvisation by Italia Conti teacher Julia Carey.
Her first job was in West End theatre in the musical I and Albert directed by John Schlesinger, which was followed by television presentation on Westward Television's version of the BBC's Blue Peter. She paid for her first flat taking a part on Emmerdale Farm, which lasted for 80 episodes.

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Lesley Sharp
Lesley Sharp (born 1960 in Liverpool, Lancashire) is an English stage, film and television actress, particularly well known for her variety of British television roles including Clocking Off, Bob & Rose and afterlife.
Adopted as the second daughter of mature Scottish parents, Sharp grew up in Formby, Merseyside. Childhood holidays were spent in Edinburgh, where "every fucking summer it rained". Sharp started acting because, as a child, she felt "invisible" and didn't "quite fit in." She has said that her inspiration to act came from watching Dick Emery on television. Her father worked for the Inland Revenue and was not keen on her taking up acting, preferring her to follow in his footsteps by becoming a civil servant. Her adoptive mother died of cancer when Sharp was 15. The adoption was never a secret in the family, but it was only after leaving home that she met her genetic mother — a working class woman unable to keep her because the father was a married man.
Sharp moved to London at 18 and, after initially failing to get into drama school, worked at the Department of Education and Science at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Responsible for filling in the warders' overtime sheets, her poor numeracy skills resulted in frequent mistakes before she was eventually asked "very nicely, but firmly" to leave.

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Lindsay Duncan
Lindsay Vere Duncan, CBE (born 7 November 1950) is a Scottish stage, television and film actress. On stage she has won two Olivier Awards, a Tony Award for her performance in Private Lives, and another Tony Award nomination for her role in Les Liaisons dangereuses. Lindsay has starred in several plays by Harold Pinter. Her most famous roles on television include: Barbara Douglas in Alan Bleasdale's G.B.H. (1991), Servilia of the Junii in the HBO/BBC/RAI series Rome (2005–2007), and Adelaide Brooke in the Doctor Who special "The Waters of Mars" (2009). On film she voiced the android TC-14 in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), and she played Alice's mother in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). She was awarded a CBE in 2009 for services to drama.
Duncan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in a working class family; her father had served in the army for 21 years before becoming a civil servant. Her parents moved to Leeds, then Birmingham when she was still a child. Duncan attended King Edwards VI High School for Girls in Birmingham through a scholarship. Despite her origins, she speaks with a Received Pronunciation accent. As of 2011, her only role with a Scottish accent is AfterLife (2003).

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Liz Smith (actress)
Liz Smith, MBE (born 11 December 1921) is a British actress, best known for her role as Bette and Aunt Belle in 2point 4 children Norma Speakman in the BBC comedy The Royle Family which starred Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston. She also had a role in The Vicar of Dibley in 1994 to 1996.
Liz Smith was born Betty Gleadle in the Crosby area of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire in 1921. When she was two years old, her mother died in childbirth. Her father walked out of her life shortly afterwards, when his new wife did not wish him to have any contact with his previous life. She was brought up by her widowed grandmother. During the Second World War, she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service of the Royal Navy.
In 1945 she married Jack Thomas, whom she met while on service in India. They had two children, but then they divorced in 1959 and Smith brought up her son and daughter on her own. She has described this as an extremely difficult period in her life, as she struggled against financial difficulties and social disapproval of single mothers.

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Louis Malle
Louis Malle (30 October 1932 – 23 November 1995) was an award-winning French film director, screenwriter, and producer. His film, Le Monde du silence, won the Palme d'Or and Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1956. He was also nominated multiple times for Academy Awards later in his career.
Malle worked in both French cinema and Hollywood, and he produced both French and English language films. His most famous films include Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958), Atlantic City (1981), and Au revoir, les enfants (1987).
Malle was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Thumeries, Nord, France. He initially studied political science at the Sciences-Po before turning to film studies at IDHEC instead.
He worked as the co-director and cameraman to Jacques Cousteau on the Oscar and Palme d'Or-winning (at the 1956 Academy Awards and Cannes Film Festival respectively) documentary The Silent World (1956) and assisted Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped (French title: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, 1956) before making his first feature, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (released in the U.K. as Lift to the Scaffold and in the U.S. originally as Frantic, later as Elevator to the Gallows) in 1957. A taut thriller featuring an original score by Miles Davis, the film made an international film star of Jeanne Moreau, at the time a leading stage actress of the state Comédie-Française. Malle was 24 years old.

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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, née Roberts (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the longest-serving (1979–1990) British prime minister of the 20th century, and the only woman ever to have held the post. A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which later became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Originally a research chemist before becoming a barrister, Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election and became Leader of the Opposition, as well as the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became prime minister after winning the 1979 general election.
After entering 10 Downing Street, Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives to reverse what she perceived as Britain's precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity during her first years in office waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her re-election in 1983. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge (popularly referred to as "poll tax") was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990, after Michael Heseltine launched a challenge to her leadership.

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Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese ( /skɔrˈsɛsɛ/; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Academy Award, Palme d'Or, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards.
Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,machismo, modern crime, and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed (2006), having been nominated a previous five times.

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Mathieu Kassovitz
Mathieu Kassovitz (born 3 April 1967) is a French director, screenwriter, producer, and actor, best known for his Cannes-winning drama La Haine. Kassovitz is also the founder of MNP Entreprise, a film production company.
Kassovitz was born in Paris, the son of Chantal Rémy, a film editor, and Peter Kassovitz, a director and writer. His mother is French and Catholic and his father is a Hungarian Jew who left Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (Mathieu Kassovitz has described himself as "not Jewish but I was brought up in a world of Jewish humor").
Kassovitz was married to French ex-actress Julie Mauduech, whom he directed and acted alongside with in his 1993 film Métisse (Café au lait, English title) and who made a brief appearance in La Haine (during the scene in the Parisian art gallery). They have a daughter, Carmen. Mauduech is now a costume designer for films.
As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has made several artistic and commercial successes. He wrote and directed La Haine (Hate, 1995), a hugely controversial film in France dealing with themes around class, race, violence, and police brutality. The film won the César Award for Best Film and netted Kassovitz the Best Director prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. When he was compared to Spike Lee because the film was being compared to Lee's Do the Right Thing, he noted the irony:

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Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh, OBE (born 20 February 1943) is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between work for the theatre and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterized by a gritty "kitchen sink realism" style. His well-known films include Life is Sweet (1990), the comedy-drama Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy (1999), and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are arguably Naked (1993) for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and Golden Lion winner Vera Drake (2004).

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Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American female filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author, and blogger.
She is best known for her romantic comedies and is a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for three films: Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. She sometimes writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. She has also co-authored the Drama Desk Award-winning theatrical production, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.
Ephron was born in New York City, eldest of four daughters in a Jewish family, and at age four moved to and grew up in Beverly Hills; her parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, were both East Coast-born and raised screenwriters. Her sisters Delia and Amy are also screenwriters. Her sister Hallie Ephron is a journalist, book reviewer, and novelist who writes crime fiction. Ephron's parents based Sandra Dee's character in the play and the Jimmy Stewart film Take Her, She's Mine on their 22-year-old daughter Nora and her letters to them from college. Both became alcoholics during their declining years. Ephron graduated from Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, California, in 1958. It was during her junior year there, that she became interested in Journalism. She then majored in political science and wrote for the weekly newspaper at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1962.

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Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso], 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.

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Paul Jesson
Paul Jesson (born 6 July 1946) is a British stage, television and film actor. He has played leading roles at the National Theatre and the RSC and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role 1986 for his role in The Normal Heart at The Royal Court. He was nominated for a Scottish Critics' Award 2004 for his portrayal of Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. He recently played the Earl of Gloucester in the Donmar Theatre production of King Lear with Derek Jacobi and is currently Maurice Montgomery in Nick Wright's play Travelling Light at the National Theatre. Recent film: Brutus in Coriolanus directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, Closer to the Moon and David Hare's Wall. He is a board member of Out of Joint and a tutor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

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Pavel Lungin
Pavel Semyonovich Lungin PAR (Russian: Павел Семёнович Лунгин; born July 12, 1949) is a Russian film director of Jewish origin. He is sometimes credited as Pavel Loungine (as in the American release of Tycoon).
Born July 12, 1949 in Moscow, Lungin is the son of a scriptwriter and philologist. He later attended Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1971. Lungin worked primarily as a scriptwriter until given the opportunity to direct "Taxi Blues" at age 40.
Lungin was awarded the Best Director Prize at 1990 Cannes Film Festival for the film "Taxi Blues" starring Pyotr Mamonov. That same year he took up residence in France, while making films in and about Russia with French producers. Two years later, his next film Luna Park would also compete at Cannes.
In 2006 he directed a religious film "The Island" (Russian "Остров") which also starred Mamonov. The film - which has English subtitles - closed the 2006 Venice Film Festival and was praised by the Russian Orthodox Church leader Alexis II.

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Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo almoˈðoβar kaβaˈʎeɾo]; born 25 September 1949) is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.
Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors and glossy décor. Desire, passion, family and identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent themes. His films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema.
He founded Spanish film production company El Deseo S.A. with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar who has produced almost all of Pedro’s films. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.

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Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE (born 21 March 1925) is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.
Brook was born in London in March 1925, the son of Simon Brook and his wife Ida (Jansen), two Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Gresham's School and Magdalen College, Oxford.
He directed Dr Faustus, his first production, in 1943 at the Torch Theatre in London, followed at the Chanticleer Theatre in 1945 with a revival of The Infernal Machine. In 1947, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon as assistant director on Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. From 1947 to 1950, he was Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His work there included a highly controversial staging of Strauss’ Salome with sets by Salvador Dalí and also an effective re-staging of Puccini’s La Boheme using sets dating from 1899. A proliferation of stage and screen work as producer and director followed.
In 1951, Brook married the actress Natasha Parry; the couple have a daughter.

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Peter Jackson
Sir Peter Robert Jackson, KNZM (born 31 October 1961) is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, who is well known for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001 to 2003), adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
He won international attention early in his career with his "splatstick" horror comedies beginning with Bad Taste (1987) before coming to mainstream prominence with Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which he shared an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination with his wife, Fran Walsh. Jackson has been awarded three Academy Awards in his career, including the award for Best Director in 2003; he also won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and Saturn Award for Best Direction the same year.
His films also include Meet the Feebles (1989), Braindead (1992), Forgotten Silver (1995), The Frighteners (1996), King Kong (2005),The Lovely Bones (2009), and the upcoming The Lord of the Rings prequels The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2013). He is also the producer of District 9 (2009) and The Adventures of Tintin (2011).

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Peter Weir
Peter Lindsay Weir, AM (born 21 August 1944) is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office hits—including the Academy Award nominees Witness, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.
Weir was born in Sydney, the son of Peggy (née Barnsley) and Lindsay Weir, a real estate agent. Weir attended The Scots College and Vaucluse Boys' High School before studying art and law at the University of Sydney. His interest in film was sparked by his meeting with fellow students, including Phillip Noyce and the future members of the Sydney filmmaking collective Ubu Films.
After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7, where he worked as a production assistant on the groundbreaking satirical comedy program The Mavis Bramston Show. During this period, using station facilities, he made his first two experimental short films, Count Vim's Last Exercise and The Life and Flight of Reverend Buckshotte.

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Peter Weiss
Peter Ulrich Weiss (8 November 1916 – 10 May 1982) was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.
Weiss was born in Nowawes (now part of Potsdam-Babelsberg), Brandenburg, to a Hungarian Jewish father and Christian mother. At age three he moved with his family to Bremen, and then during his adolescence to Berlin where Weiss began training for a career as a visual artist. In 1934 he emigrated with his family to Chislehurst, near London, England, where he studied photography at the Polytechnic School of Photography, and then in 1937-1938 attended the Prague Art Academy. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, his family moved to Sweden, and Weiss himself removed to Switzerland. In 1939 he again emigrated to Stockholm, Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became a Swedish citizen in 1946.
Weiss was married three times: to the painter Helga Henschen, 1943; to Carlota Dethorey, 1949; and to the hereditary baroness Gunilla Palmstierna, 1964. He was politically active as a member of the Communist Party of Sweden, and in 1967 participated in Bertrand Russell's tribunal against the Vietnam War in Stockholm.

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Peter Wight (actor)
Peter Wight (born 1950) is an English actor.
His television credits include: Z-Cars, Meantime, Anna Lee, Life on Mars, Holby City, Where the Heart Is, Early Doors, Midsomer Murders, Monday Monday and Party Animals.
He also appeared in notable films such as Naked, Secrets & Lies, FairyTale: A True Story, Vera Drake, Pride & Prejudice, Babel and All or Nothing. In 2007 film Hot Fuzz, he appears as pub landlord Roy Porter. He also appeared in the 2012 series Public Enemies.

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Phil Daniels
Philip W. "Phil" Daniels (born 25 October 1958, Islington) is an English actor, most noted for film and television roles as cockneys such as Jimmy in Quadrophenia, Richards in Scum, Stewart in The Class of Miss MacMichael, Mark in Meantime, Kevin Wicks in EastEnders, DCS Frank Patterson in New Tricks and Grandad Trotter in the Only Fools and Horses prequel Rock & Chips.
He attended Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington.
Daniels has made appearances in many films and television series. He made his film debut in 1976, aged 17, as a waiter in Bugsy Malone, That same year he had significant roles in three television series: The Molly Wopsies, Four Idle Hands, and The Flockton Flyer; however, he had enjoyed an incidental appearance (with fellow drama students) the previous year (1975) in Thames Television's You Must Be Joking! Over the following four years he appeared in Quadrophenia, Breaking Glass, and Scum. He also appeared in the 1970s TV drama serial Raven.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Daniels was a member of new wave band The Cross, along with fellow actor Peter Hugo Daly, the band releasing a single, "Kill Another Night" on RCA Records in 1979. His musical inclinations were revealed when he starred in a 1985 British snooker musical Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire. He narrated tracks on the Parklife and Think Tank albums for Blur.

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Phil Davis (actor)
Philip Davis (born 30 July 1953) is an English film actor, writer and director who has appeared in many films and television series. He has written and directed various dramas during his career.
Davis has a daughter, Amy Elisabeth (born 2002, Hackney, London) by actress Eve Matheson. The couple married in the same borough later that year.

wn.com/Phil_Davis_(actor)
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino (pronunciation: /ˌtærənˈtiːnoʊ/; born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. He has received many industry awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA and the Palme d'Or and had been nominated for an Emmy and Grammy.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino was an avid film fan. His career began in the late 1980's, when he wrote and directed My Best Friend's Birthday. Its screenplay would form the basis for True Romance. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
His movies are generally characterized by stylistic influences from grindhouse, kung fu, and spaghetti western films. Tarantino also frequently collaborates with his friend and fellow filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.

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Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925 – November 20, 2006) was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.
His films MASH (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Helen (née Matthews), a Mayflower descendant from Nebraska, and Bernard Clement Altman, a wealthy insurance salesman and amateur gambler, who came from an upper-class family. Altman's ancestry was German, English and Irish; his paternal grandfather, Frank Altman, Sr., anglicized the spelling of the family name from "Altmann" to "Altman". Altman had a Catholic upbringing, but he did not continue to practice as a Catholic as an adult, although he has been referred to as "a sort of Catholic" and a Catholic director. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City. He graduated from Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri in 1943.

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Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (pronounced [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛˈsɔ̃] in French; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the French New Wave. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir. As Jean-Luc Godard said, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music."
Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth (née Clausels) and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life, and the year of his birth – 1901 or 1907 – varies depending on the source. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and turned to painting after graduating. Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films - Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war.
Initially also a photographer, Bresson made his first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. During World War II, he spent over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp - an experience which informs Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped). In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his meticulous approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations.^{[citation needed]} Difficulty finding funding for his projects was also a factor.

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Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski (born 18 August 1933) is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers." Polanski's films have inspired diverse directors, including the Coen brothers,Atom Egoyan,Darren Aronofsky,Park Chan-wook,Abel Ferrara, and Wes Craven.
Born in Paris to Polish parents, he moved with his family back to Poland in 1937, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Holocaust and was educated in Poland and became a director of both art house and commercial films. Polanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water (1962), made in Poland, was nominated for a United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but was beaten by Federico Fellini's 8½. He has since received five more Oscar nominations, along with two Baftas, four Césars, a Golden Globe Award and the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival in France. In the United Kingdom he directed three films, beginning with Repulsion (1965). In 1968 he moved to the United States, and cemented his status by directing the Oscar-winning horror film Rosemary's Baby (1968).

wn.com/Roman_Polanski
Ron Cook
Ron Cook (born in 1948) is an English actor who has been active in the theatre, film and television since the 1970s. He is from South Shields, County Durham, England and is a graduate of Rose Bruford College.
On stage, he appeared in the original 1988 production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good. He was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award in the category of Best Supporting Actor in 2000 for his role in Juno and the Paycock at the Donmar Warehouse. He also appeared in a new play by Conor McPherson, The Seafarer, at the Royal National Theatre. In 2008-2009, he took part in the Donmar's West End season at Wyndham's Theatre, playing Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Polonius in Hamlet. In 2011, he played The Fool in King Lear starring Derek Jacobi at the Donmar and on an 8-week tour.

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Ronald Searle
Ronald William Fordham Searle CBE, RDI (3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011) was a British artist and satirical cartoonist. He is perhaps best remembered as the creator of St Trinian's School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth series.
Searle was born in Cambridge, England, where his father was a porter at Cambridge Railway Station. He started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of 15. He trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) for two years.
In April 1939, realizing that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, Singapore fell to the Japanese, and he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. Searle contracted both beri-beri and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese.

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Rupert Davies
Rupert Davies (22 May 1916 – 22 November 1976) was a British actor best remembered for playing the title role in the BBC's 1960s television adaptation of Maigret, based on Georges Simenon's Maigret novels.
Davies was born in Liverpool. After service in the British Merchant Navy he was a Sub-Lieutenant Observer with the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. In 1940 the Swordfish aircraft in which he was flying ditched in the sea off the Dutch Coast. Davies was captured and interned in the famous Stalag Luft III POW camp. He made three attempts to escape but all failed. During his captivity he began to take part in theatre performances, entertaining his fellow prisoners.
On his release Davies resumed his career in acting almost immediately, starring in an ex-prisoner of war show, Back Home, which was hosted at the Stoll Theatre, London. He became a staple of British television appearing in numerous plays and series, including Quatermass II, Ivanhoe, Emergency - Ward 10, Danger Man, The Champions, Doctor at Large (1971), Arthur of the Britons and War and Peace (1972). He also provided the voice of Professor Ian McClaine in the Gerry Anderson series Joe 90. In 1964, having released a 45rpm single "Smoking My Pipe" late the previous year that capitalised upon the iconic Maigret opening sequence, he became the first person to win the Pipe Smoker of the Year award.

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Sally Hawkins
Sally Cecilia Hawkins (born 27 April 1976) is an English actress. Her performance as Poppy in the 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky won her several international awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Other significant roles include Susan in Vera Drake (2004), Sue Trinder in the BBC serial Fingersmith (2005), Anne Elliot in Persuasion (2007), and Rita O'Grady in Made in Dagenham (2010).
The daughter of Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, authors and illustrators of children's books, Hawkins was brought up in Blackheath in southeast London, and attended James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1998.
Hawkins' theatre appearances include Much Ado About Nothing (2000), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2000), Misconceptions (2001), Country Music (2004), and David Hare's adaptation of Federico García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba in 2005.
Hawkins made her first notable screen performance as Samantha in the 2002 Mike Leigh film All or Nothing. She also appeared as Slasher in the 2004 film Layer Cake. She played the role of Zena Blake in the BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, Tipping the Velvet in 2002. Her first major television role came in 2005, when she played Susan Trinder in the BAFTA-nominated BBC drama Fingersmith, an adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel of the same name, in which she co-starred with Imelda Staunton, as she had in Vera Drake. Since then she has gone on to star in another BBC adaptation, Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

wn.com/Sally_Hawkins
Sam Kelly
Sam Kelly (born 1 February 1943) is an English actor who has appeared in television, radio and theatre.
Kelly was born in Manchester on 1 February 1943. He worked for three years in the civil service in Liverpool before training as an actor at LAMDA. After graduating in 1967 he appeared in repertory theatres around the UK.
He has had roles in British sitcoms such as Porridge as Bunny Warren, 'Allo 'Allo! as Captain Hans Geering leaving after series three, On the Up as Dennis Waterman's chauffeur and We'll Think of Something as Les Brooks. From 1995 to 2003, he played Barbara's husband Ted in the British sitcom series Barbara.
He also appeared in the Doctor Who audio dramas "The Holy Terror" and "Return to the Web Planet" by Big Finish Productions. He played Bernard in Holding On (1997) and Carl Langbehn in the five-part television drama Christabel (1988). He appeared in Midsomer Murders: Down Among the Dead Men as Jack Fothergill and as the eccentric impoverished ghost writer, Majors, in the Inspector Morse episode "Second Time Around".

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Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.

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Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray ( Shottojit Rae (help·info); 2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992) was an Indian Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator who brought the Indian cinema to world recognition with Pather Panchali (1955; The Song of the Road) and its two sequels, known as the Apu Trilogy. As a director Ray was noted for his humanism, his versatility, and his detailed control over his films and their music. He was one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. Ray was born in the city of Kolkata into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and literature. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent filmmaking after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir and viewing the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves of Vittorio De Sica during a visit to London.
Ray directed thirty-seven films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, graphic designer and film critic. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes film festival. This film, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a number of awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. The Government of India honoured him with the Bharat Ratna in 1992.

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Shawn Slovo
Shawn Slovo (c. 1950) is a screenwriter, best known for the film A World Apart, based on her childhood in South Africa under the apartheid. She is the daughter of the late South African Communist Party leaders Joe Slovo and Ruth First. She also wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film Catch a Fire, which is also a historical film about apartheid, and for the 2001 film Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
In the late 1970s she served as Robert De Niro's personal assistant while he made the films Raging Bull and The King of Comedy.
Slovo currently lives in London and often works for Working Title Films. Her sister Gillian Slovo is also a writer and her sister Robyn Slovo is a producer.

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Shohei Imamura
Shōhei Imamura (今村昌平, Imamura Shōhei^?, Tokyo, 15 September 1926 – 30 May 2006) was a Japanese film director. Imamura was the first Japanese director to win two Palme d'Or awards.
His eldest son Daisuke Tengan is also a script writer and film director, and worked on the screenplays to Imamura's films The Eel (1997), Dr. Akagi (1998), Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001) and 11'9''01 September 11 (2002).
Though born to a comfortably upper-middle-class doctor's family in Tokyo, Imamura was introduced to another part of post-war Japanese society early in life. For a short time after 1945, when Japan was in a devastated condition following the war, Imamura participated in the thriving black market selling cigarettes and liquor. Reflecting this period of his life, Imamura's interests as a filmmaker were usually focused on the lower strata of Japanese society. He studied Western history at Waseda University, but spent more time participating in theatrical and political activities ([1]). He cited a viewing of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (羅生門, Rashōmon^?) in 1950 as an early inspiration, and said he saw it as an indication of the new freedom of expression possible in Japan in the post-war era.

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Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as archetypes of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks movie studio.
Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.

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Sylvestra Le Touzel
Sylvestra Le Touzel is a British television, film and stage actor who was born on Jersey in the Channel Islands and raised in Kensington, London. She was schooled in East Acton.
Her first television role was in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber, playing one of the children who bedevil the Second Doctor and his companions in the 'Land of Fiction'. A well-known early role was that of Fanny Price in the BBC dramatisation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1983).
Le Touzel has also been seen on the small screen in shows as diverse as Dixon of Dock Green, The Brontes of Haworth, The Uninvited, The Professionals, Lovejoy, Alas Smith and Jones, Midsomer Murders, My Family and The Long Walk to Finchley (as Patricia Hornsby-Smith). In 1994 she played Sarah Teale in the TV series Between the Lines. In 2007, she also played the role of Mrs Allen in the ITV adaptation of Northanger Abbey. She has also played Harriet Waterhouse in the ITV drama Bonkers.
She co-starred in the BBC Schools "Look and Read" series, in their cult serial The Boy from Space. She also appeared in a classic Heineken advert "The Water in Majorca" with Bryan Pringle.

wn.com/Sylvestra_Le_Touzel
Tim Roth
Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth (born 14 May 1961) is an English film actor and director. He is best known for his roles in the films Made in Britain, Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the latter. He most recently starred as Cal Lightman in the TV series Lie to Me.
Roth was born in London, England, the son of Ann, a painter and teacher, and Ernie, a Fleet Street journalist, painter and, until the 1970s, a member of the British Communist Party. Roth's father was born under the surname "Smith" in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, to a British immigrant family of Irish descent; he changed his surname to "Roth" in the 1940s, "partly through solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, partly because the British were far from welcome in some of the countries to which his job took him".
Roth attended the Strand School in Tulse Hill. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at London's Camberwell College of Art.

wn.com/Tim_Roth
Timothy Spall
Timothy Leonard Spall, OBE (born 27 February 1957) is an English character actor and occasional presenter.
Spall, the third of four sons, was born in Battersea, South London. His mother, Sylvia R. (née Leonard), was a hairdresser, and his father, Joseph L. Spall, was a postal worker. He trained at the National Youth Theatre and RADA, where he was awarded the Bancroft Gold Medal as the most promising actor in his year. His brother, Matthew, is studio director of the computer games company Morpheme. Another brother, Richard, is the landlord tenant of the Astolat public house in Guildford.
Spall initially made his mark in theatre performing in productions for Birmingham Rep and, later, The Royal Shakespeare Company including The Merry Wives of Windsor, Three Sisters, Nicholas Nickleby and The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
Following a film debut in Quadrophenia and wider TV exposure playing the gormless Radish Barry Taylor in all five series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Kevin in Outside Edge and as Aubrey the appalling chef in Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet, Spall has since appeared in films such as Crusoe, Secrets & Lies, Shooting the Past, Topsy-Turvy, Vanilla Sky, Rock Star, The Last Samurai, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The King's Speech. He gained international recognition as Peter Pettigrew ("Wormtail") in the Harry Potter film series. In 1991 he guest-starred in the series 5 Red Dwarf episode Back to Reality. In 1993, Spall was in Rab C. Nesbitt.

wn.com/Timothy_Spall
Trevor Nunn
Sir Trevor Robert Nunn, CBE (born 14 January 1940) is an English theatre, film and television director. Nunn has been the Artistic Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and, currently, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. He has directed musicals and dramas for the stage, as well as opera. His well-known musicals are Cats (1981) and Les Misérables (1985). His dramas include Nicholas Nickleby and Macbeth. He has been nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical, the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical, winning the Tony Award (Musical) for Les Misérables and the Olivier Award for Summerfolk / The Merchant of Venice / Troilus and Cressida; and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
Nunn was born in Ipswich, England, to Robert Alexander Nunn, a cabinetmaker, and Dorothy May Piper. He was educated at Northgate Grammar School, Ipswich and Downing College, Cambridge, where he began his stage career. He won a Director's Scholarship, becoming a trainee director at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in 1962.

wn.com/Trevor_Nunn
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Stipetić (German pronunciation: [ˈʋɛɐ̯nɐ ˈhɛɐ̯tsoːk ˈstɪpɛtɪtʃ]; born 5 September 1942), known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.
He is often considered one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schröter, and Wim Wenders. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who find themselves in conflict with nature. French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive."
Herzog was born Werner Herzog Stipetić to a German father Dietrich Herzog and a Croatian mother Elizabeth Stipetić in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang (nestled in the Chiemgau Alps), after the house next to theirs was destroyed during a bombing raid at the close of World War II. When he was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich. His father had abandoned the family early in his youth. Werner would later adopt his father's surname Herzog (German for "duke"), which he thought sounded more impressive for a filmmaker.

wn.com/Werner_Herzog
William Hogarth
William Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian."
William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products. Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his father's imprisonment.^{[citation needed]}

wn.com/William_Hogarth
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (born 14 August 1945) is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer. Since 1996, Wenders has been the president of the European Film Academy in Berlin.
Wenders was born in Düsseldorf into a traditional Catholic family. His father, Heinrich Wenders, was a surgeon. Use of the Dutch name, "Wim", a shortened version of the baptismal name "Wilhelm/Willem", reflected his mother's Dutch provenance, but the Dutch version was rejected by the civil registration authorities in 1945 as "unGerman". He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine (1963–64) and philosophy (1964–65) in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he dropped out of university studies and moved to Paris in October 1966 to become a painter. Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school IDHEC (now La Fémis), and instead became an engraver in the studio of Johnny Friedlander, an American artist, in Montparnasse. During this time, Wenders became fascinated with cinema, and saw up to five movies a day at the local movie theater.

wn.com/Wim_Wenders
Wong Kar-wai
Wong Kar-wai BBS (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised, emotionally resonant work, including Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997) and 2046 (2004). His film In the Mood for Love (2000), starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Wong's films frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as sketchy, digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery.
Wong was listed at number three on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound Top Ten Directors list of modern times.

wn.com/Wong_Kar-wai
Woody Allen
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."

wn.com/Woody_Allen
Yasujiro Ozu
Yasujirō Ozu (小津安二郎, Ozu Yasujirō^?, 12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director and script writer. He began his career during the era of silent films, which extended well into the 1930s in Japan. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the themes in his work. His outstanding works include Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Tokyo Story (1953), and Floating Weeds (1959).
Ozu's reputation outside Japan has grown since his death. Influential monographs by Donald Richie,Paul Schrader, and David Bordwell have ensured a wide appreciation of Ozu's style, aesthetics and themes. Ozu was dubbed the tenth greatest director of all time by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of Critics' top ten directors.
Ozu was born in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo. At the age of ten, he and his siblings were sent by his father to live in his father's home town of Matsuzaka, Mie Prefecture, where he spent most of his youth. He was educated at a boarding school but spent much of his time in the local cinema rather than a classroom.

wn.com/Yasujiro_Ozu

The Short and Curlies - Mike Leigh (1987)

A short comedy by Mike Leigh about the romance between a young woman (Sylvestra Le Touzel)...

published: 31 Jan 2012

author: aiiitunes

A Sense of History (1992)

A SENSE OF HISTORY Year: 1992 Director: Mike Leigh...

published: 31 Jan 2012

author: VideoProbava

Mike Leigh's Four Days in July 1985

The setting of Mike Leigh's Four Days in July is Belfast in the mid-'80s, just before the ...

published: 02 Mar 2012

author: SingingDetective81

Mike Leigh on QTV

www.cbc.ca Mike Leigh, the influential master of British cinema is back with a new film ti...

published: 26 Apr 2011

author: Qtv

Mike Leigh on Happy Go Lucky

Mike Leigh's latest film is an uplifting tale....

published: 20 Apr 2008

author: itn

All Or Nothing - Official Trailer (2002, Mike Leigh)

All or Nothing is a 2002 British drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh, released b...

published: 18 Nov 2011

author: GayGeisha

Working with Mike Leigh: 'I think 'intense' is too small a word b

Two of the stars of Another Year b...

published: 03 Nov 2010

author: TheGuardian

Mike Leigh's Five Minute Films #5

Afternoon...

published: 25 Jul 2006

author: ineffablemedia

Another Year - Mike Leigh - BlackBerry Interview

...

published: 17 Sep 2010

author: BlackBerry

Kermode and Mayo talk Mike Leigh's method

Simon and Mark interview Lesley Manville, who plays the character of Mary in Mike Leigh's ...

published: 27 Oct 2010

author: kermodeandmayo

Career Girls - Cardinal Traits - Mike Leigh

Clip from Mike Leigh's classic....

published: 02 Jun 2010

author: PaulSuedeTwin

Director's Cut: Mike Leigh on Secrets and Lies - Film 2011 With Claudia Winkleman - BBC One

More about this programme: www.bbc.co.uk In this week's Director's Cut, Mike Leigh talks a...

published: 23 Nov 2011

author: BBC

Another Year interview - Mike Leigh

It's not always hard to tell Mike Leigh and a ray of sunshine apart, but his films continu...

published: 04 Nov 2010

author: Empiremagazine

meantime part 5

Colin (Tim Roth, making his screen debut) and his brother Mark (Phil Daniels, who starred ...

published: 22 Apr 2007

author: TashaDK

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photo: AP / Khalil Hamra

A Syrian gunman shoots in the air during the funeral of 29 year-old Free Syrian Army fighter, Husain Al-Ali, who was killed during clashes in Aleppo, in the town of Marea on the outskirts of Aleppo city, Syria, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2012.

Syrian fighters join forces against al-Assad

Al Jazeera

09 Dec 2012

Syria's rebel leaders have agreed to come under a united command in a bid to integrate diverse fighting groups and streamline the route for arms essential to their struggle against President Bashar al-Assad. The new body, expected to be announced officially on Sunday, hopes to form the basis of a united rebel front ... "It also aims to get the situation under control once the regime falls." ... 378 Source .. Agencies. Share ... News ... Egypt....(size: 18.6Kb)

photo: AP / Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's office

In this photo released by Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's office, software company founder John McAfee is pictured in an immigration detention center in Guatemala City, Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012.

McAfee hospitalized after being denied asylum

The Salt Lake Tribune

07 Dec 2012

By SONIA PEREZ-DIAZ. The Associated Press. First Published Dec 06 2012 09.10 am • Updated 1 minute ago ... ....(size: 0.8Kb)

photo: AP / Vahid Salemi

File - Iranian worshippers listen to a sermon during Friday prayers as an Iranian flag flutters at Tehran University, in Tehran, Iran, Friday, July 6, 2012.

Can Saudi Arabia and Iran Reestablish the Medina Pact?

WorldNews.com

07 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. The in- and out-fighting between present-day Saudi Arabia and Iran is a mirror image of what occurred to Prophet Muhammad's Islamic Movement right after his death ... Still, and due to prosperity and wealth, an influx of trade goods, religious toleration, an emphasis on learning, and increased food supplies, Islam was becoming a vast empire ... Recent U.S ... Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)....(size: 7.5Kb)

photo: AP / Hassan Ammar

Egyptian protesters gather outside the presidential palace after they broke through a barbed wire barricade that was keeping them from getting closer to the presidential palace, in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Dec. 7, 2012.

Egypt's opposition to shun Morsi talks

Al Jazeera

08 Dec 2012

Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president, is expected to press ahead with talks on ways to end Egypt's worst crisis since he took office even though the country's main opposition leaders have vowed to boycott negotiations. The capital Cairo and other cities have been rocked by violent protests since November 22, when Morsi issued a decree awarding himself sweeping powers that put him above the law ... 575 Source .. Al Jazeera and agencies ... ....(size: 19.5Kb)

photo: AP / Maya Alleruzzo

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is seen during a photo opportunity in his office at the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt

Egypt: President Morsi cancels decree that sparked protests

IBN Live

09 Dec 2012

Cairo. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has cancelled a decree that gave him sweeping powers and sparked huge protests, but did not delay a referendum on a constitution as his opponents had demanded ... Video Photo Gallery ....(size: 1.2Kb)

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Britain's indie movie-makers need you

The Observer

09 Dec 2012

Director Ben Wheatley at the 65th Locarno film festival in August 2012 in Switzerland. Photograph. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/WireImage ... Lauded as a warped successor to Mike Leigh, Wheatley's fourth film is already in the can, a very low-budget film financed by Film4's new digital arm, Film4.0. His fifth, a multimillion dollar monster movie is roaring towards production ... Print this Share Contact us Send to a friend. Sender's name ... ....(size: 7.4Kb)

Ian McKellen: 'Gandalf the Grey likes boogieing around Hobbiton and having a drink'

The Guardian

09 Dec 2012

Ian McKellen mesmerised us as a classical actor, but his portrayal of Tolkien's Gandalf has made him a global superstar ... Ian McKellen in the Grapes, the pub he co-owns ... Photograph. Pal Hansen for the Observer ... "Q ... An Unexpected Journey ... And ideally, he says, with parts where he can bring something of himself – he'd still love, he says incidentally, to do something with Mike Leigh – because "that's part of the fun, always part of the fun ... ....(size: 16.2Kb)

Five best films out now

The Independent

08 Dec 2012

Amour (12A) ... Rust and Bone (15) ... Marion Cotillard (above) stars ... Ben Wheatley's hilarious black comedy about a caravanning holiday-cum-killing spree pays homage to Mike Leigh's 1967 Play for Today, Nuts in May ... ....(size: 1.0Kb)

Gollum’s precious moments

Independent online (SA)

08 Dec 2012

It's almost impossible to estimate the impact Gollum has had on Andy Serkis. Playing the wizened creature in Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning adaptation of JRR Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings was more than just another role. “It changed the course of my career,” Serkis admits. Before Gollum, he was a respected British actor, gaining good notices for Mike Leigh films like Career Girls and Topsy-Turvy ... Serkis notes ... ....(size: 9.9Kb)

Gollum's precious moments: Andy Serkis' unexpected journey from The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit

The Independent

07 Dec 2012

It's almost impossible to estimate the impact Gollum has had on Andy Serkis. Playing the wizened creature in Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning adaptation of JRR Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings was more than just another role. "It changed the course of my career," Serkis admits. Before Gollum, he was a respected British actor, gaining good notices for Mike Leigh films like Career Girls and Topsy-Turvy. Then along came Jackson....(size: 9.3Kb)

Movie review: Life Just Is

The Independent

06 Dec 2012

You can see the influences on Alex Barrett’s debut feature, most prominently Mike Leigh and Eric Rohmer ... ....(size: 0.6Kb)

THR's Costume Designer Roundtable: Dressing Actors Is 'Somewhere Between a War and a Circus'

The Hollywood Reporter

06 Dec 2012

share ... In Hitchcock, Julie Weiss, who started in theater as well, brought to life the iconic director, his wife, Alma, and starlet Janet Leigh in early '60s costumes, often using the color red to convey emotion and tension ... THR ... When you work on a Mike Leigh film, you don't have a script ... Weiss played Hitchock's black attire against Leigh's pink and wife Alma's blood red to heighten the film's emotional intensity....(size: 20.4Kb)

European Directors Push Politicians to Defend Copyright Laws

The Hollywood Reporter

04 Dec 2012

Thousands of industry professionals, including directors Michel Hazanavicius, Mike Leigh and Wim Wenders sign a petition defending author's rights. COLOGNE, Germany – Some of Europe's most acclaimed directors, including Oscar winners Michel Hazanavicius and Costa-Gavras; Brit veterans Mike Leigh and Ken Loach and German auteurs Wim Wenders ......(size: 3.3Kb)

photo: WN / Priya Dashini

Night bazaars are street markets which operate at night and are generally dedicated to more leisurely strolling, shopping, and eating than more business like day markets.

23 - 29 Nov Bazaar Hotlist

Harpers Bazaar

04 Dec 2012

This week's style, art and culture hot list by Lucy Halfhead. Valentino's retrospective, discount Xmas shopping and more. by Lucy Halfhead / / comment(s) 0 add comments. Previous /10 Next Close. Share this image ... Also on the agenda is Lust with Jake and Dinos Chapman, Greed with Mike Leigh, and Gluttony with the fabulous Vivienne Westwood – all underlining the fact that there is no better catalyst for storytelling thansin ... ....(size: 28.6Kb)

Movie review: Sightseers, Hitchcock meets Leigh in grisly, giggly horror

The Independent

30 Nov 2012

A killer in a cagoule? That is the unlikely but alluring prospect held out by Sightseers, a comedy of manners in which murder arrives out of the great blue yonder, usually in the vicinity of a caravan park ... These early scenes, with their stop-start uncertainty, are possibly the best of the whole film, reminiscent of the glum, bickering couple in Mike Leigh's Nuts in May ... it certainly isn't her matching knitted bra and pants ... ....(size: 5.3Kb)

Movie review: I, Anna

NZ Herald

29 Nov 2012

The always-watchable Rampling is the title character, a London divorcee who, when we meet her, is putting her toe back in the dating water with the encouragement of her daughter Emmy (Atwell) ... There's more murk than menace in the noirish thriller that unfolds, although the two principals play their parts well and versatile Mike Leigh regular Marsan is a pleasure to watch as Reid's colleague ... Stars. 3/5. Cast ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)

Sightseers – review

The Guardian

29 Nov 2012

Comedies don't come much darker than this chillingly distinctive caravan caper from the makers of Kill List 4. Brutally unsettling … Steve Oram and Alice Lowe in Sightseers ... There's an obvious comparison with Mike Leigh's Nuts in May, and there are even traces of Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett, whose gentler, observational comedy is turned into something nightmarish, bringing in an exquisitely horrible Readers' Wives aesthetic ... ....(size: 4.3Kb)

Sightseers (15)

The Independent

29 Nov 2012

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Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh, April 2008
Born	(1943-02-20) 20 February 1943 (age 69) Brocket Hall, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, England ^[1]
Spouse	Alison Steadman (1973-2001)

Mike Leigh, OBE (born 20 February 1943) is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design.^[2] He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s his career moved between work for the theatre and making films for BBC Television, many of which were characterized by a gritty "kitchen sink realism" style. His well-known films include Life is Sweet (1990), the comedy-drama Career Girls (1997), the Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy Turvy (1999), and the bleak working-class drama All or Nothing (2002). His most notable works are arguably Naked (1993) for which he won the Best Director Award at Cannes,^[3] the BAFTA-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies (1996) and Golden Lion winner Vera Drake (2004).

His films and stage plays, according to the critic Michael Coveney, "comprise a distinctive, homogenous body of work which stands comparison with anyone's in the British theatre and cinema over the same period." ^[4] Coveney further noted Leigh's role in helping to create stars – Liz Smith in Hard Labour, Alison Steadman in Abigail's Party, Brenda Blethyn in Grown-Ups, Antony Sher in Goose-Pimples, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in Meantime, Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet, David Thewlis in Naked – and remarked that the list of actors who have worked with him over the years – including Sheila Kelley, Paul Jesson, Phil Daniels, Lindsay Duncan, Lesley Sharp, Kathy Burke, Stephen Rea, Sam Kelly, Eric Richard, Julie Walters – "comprises an impressive, almost representative, nucleus of outstanding British acting talent." ^[5] Ian Buruma, writing in the New York Review of Books in January 1994, noted: "It is hard to get on a London bus or listen to the people at the next table in a cafeteria without thinking of Mike Leigh. Like other wholly original artists, he has staked out his own territory. Leigh's London is as distinctive as Fellini's Rome or Ozu's Tokyo."^[6]

Leigh begins his projects without a script, but starts from a basic premise which is developed through improvisation by the actors. Leigh works initially one-to-one with each actor, developing a character who is based, in the first place, on someone he or she knows. "The world of the characters and their relationships is brought into existence by discussion and a great amount of improvisation – that is, improvising a character. And research into anything and everything that will fill out the authenticity of the character." It is only after months of rehearsal, or 'preparing for going out on location to make up a film', that Leigh writes a shooting script, a bare scenario. Then, on the shoot, on location, after further 'real rehearsing', the script is finalised. "I'll set up an improvisation ,... I'll analyse and discuss it,... we'll do another, and I'll ... refine and refine... until the actions and dialogue are totally integrated. Then we shoot it." ^[7]

Further aspects of Leigh to note; "He is a gifted cartoonist; he is a northerner who came south, slightly chippy, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background; and he is a child of the 1960s, and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television." ^[8]

Mike Leigh has been selected to be jury president of the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival.^[9] After being nominated for, and awarded, some big prizes, it will be the first time that he will function as president of an international panel of judges at a film festival.^{[citation needed]}

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Style
4 Personal life
5 Filmography
6 List of plays
7 Recurring collaborators
8 Further reading
9 References
10 External links

Early life [link]

Leigh, having been born in Welwyn, (his mother, in her confinement, went to stay with her parents in Hertfordshire for comfort and support while her husband was serving as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps), was brought up in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, the son of Phyllis Pauline (née Cousin) and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctor.^[10] Leigh's family was a Jewish immigrant one (whose surname was originally Lieberman, but this was anglicised in 1939, 'for obvious reasons.') ^[11]^[12]^[13]^[14] The war having come to an end Leigh's father began his career as a general practitioner in Higher Broughton, "the epicentre of Leigh's youngest years and the area memorialised in Hard Labour." ^[15] Leigh went to Salford Grammar School, as did the director Les Blair, his friend, who produced Leigh's first feature film Bleak Moments in 1971. There was a strong tradition of drama in the all-boys school, and an English master called Mr Nutter supplied the library with new plays the minute they were published.^[16] Outside of school Leigh thrived in the Manchester branch of Habonim. He attended summer camps and winter activities over the Christmas break all round the country in the last years of the 1950s. Throughout this time, (and though supplemented by his discovery of Picasso, Surrealism, The Goon Show, and even family visits to the Hallé Orchestra and the D'Oyly Carte), the most important part of his artistic consumption was the cinema. In 1960, 'to his utter astonishment', he won a scholarship to RADA. Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh went on to start honing his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress Alison Steadman.^[17]

Leigh responded negatively to RADA's agenda, found himself being taught how to 'laugh, cry and snog' for weekly rep purposes and so became a sullen student. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (in 1963), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and the London School of Film Technique in Charlotte Street. When he had arrived in London, one of the first films he had seen was Shadows, an 'improvised' film by John Cassavetes, in which a cast of unknowns was observed 'living, loving and bickering' on the streets of New York, and Leigh had "felt it might be possible to create complete plays from scratch with a group of actors." ^[18] Other influences from this time included Harold Pinter's The Caretaker – "Leigh was mesmerised by the play and the (Arts Theatre) production," – Samuel Beckett, whose novels he read avidly, and the surreal writing of Flann O'Brien, whose 'tragi-comedy' Leigh found particularly appealing. Influential and important productions he saw at this period included Beckett's Endgame, Peter Brook's King Lear, and in 1965, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, a production developed through improvisations, the actors having based their characterisations on people they had visited in a mental hospital. The visual worlds of Ronald Searle,^[19] George Grosz, Picasso, and William Hogarth exerted another kind of influence. He played small roles in several British films in the early 1960s, (West 11,Two Left Feet), and played a young deaf-mute, interrogated by Rupert Davies, in the BBC TV series Maigret. In 1964/65 he teamed up with David Halliwell, and designed and directed the first production of Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre.

Career [link]

Between 1965 and 1970 Leigh's activity was varied. In 1965 he went to work at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham as a resident assistant director and had the opportunity to start experimenting with the idea that writing and rehearsing could potentially be part of the same process. The Box Play, a family scenario staged in a cage-like box, "absorbed all sorts of contemporary ideas in art such as the space frames of Roland Pichet..it was visually very exciting," , and two more 'improvised' pieces followed.^[20] After the Birmingham interlude he found a flat in Euston, where he lived for the next ten years. In 1966/67 he worked as an assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, assisting Peter Hall on (a disastrous) Macbeth, and on Coriolanus , and Trevor Nunn on a knockabout The Taming of the Shrew. He also worked on an improvised play with some professional actors on a play of his own called NENAA, (an acronym for the North East New Arts Assiociation), which explored the fantasies of a Tynesider working in a café, with ideas of founding an arts association in the north-east. Leigh wrote, in 1970; " I saw that we must start off with a collection of totally unrelated characters (each one the specific creation of its actor) and then go through a process in which I must cause them to meet each other, and build a network of real relationships; the play would be drawn from the results." After Stratford-upon-Avon Leigh directed a couple of London drama school productions that included Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore at E15 Acting School in Loughton – where he met Alison Steadman for the first time. In 1968, wanting to return to Manchester, he sub-let his London flat and moved to Levenshulme. Taking up a part-time lectureship in a Catholic women teachers training college, Sedgley Park, he ran a drama course and devised and directed Epilogue, focusing on a priest with doubts, and for the Manchester Youth Theatre he devised and directed two big-cast projects, Big Basil and Glum Victoria and the Lad with Specs. As the decade came to a close Leigh knew he wanted to make films, and that "The manner of working was at last fixed. There would be discussions and rehearsals. Plays or films would develop organically with actors fully liberated into the creative process. After an exploratory improvisation period, Leigh would write a structure, indicating the order in which scenes happened, usually with a single bare sentence:Johnny and Sophie meet; Betty does Joy's hair; [etc..]And it was rehearsed and rehearsed until it achieved the required quality of 'finish'." ^[21]

In the 1970s, Leigh made nine television plays. Earlier plays such as Nuts in May and Abigail's Party tended more towards bleakly yet humorously satirising middle-class manners and attitudes. His plays are generally more caustic, stridently trying to show the banality of society.^{[citation needed]} Goose-Pimples and Abigail's Party both focus on the vulgar middle class in a convivial party setting that spirals out of control. The television version of Abigail's Party was made at some speed, Steadman was pregnant at the time, and Leigh's objections to flaws in the production, particularly the lighting, led to his preference for theatrical films.

There was something of a hiatus in Leigh's career following the death of his father at the end of February 1985. Leigh was in Australia at the time – having agreed to attend a screenwriters conference in Melbourne at the start of 1985, he had then accepted an invitation to teach at the Australian Film School in Sydney – and he then 'buried his solitude and sense of loss in a busy round of people, publicity and talks.' He gradually extended 'the long journey home' and went on to visit Bali, Singapore, Hong Kong, China. He said later, " The whole thing was an amazing, unforgettable period in my life. But it was all to do with personal feelings, my father, where to go next, and my desire to make a feature film. I felt I was at at the end of one stage of my career and at the start of another." His 1986 project codenamed 'Rhubarb' , for which he had gathered actors in Blackburn, including Jane Horrocks, Julie Walters and David Thewlis, was cancelled after seven weeks rehearsals and Leigh returned home. "The nature of what I do is totally creative, and you have to get in there and stick with it. The tension between the bourgeois suburban and the anarchist bohemian that is in my work is obviously in my life, too...I started to pull myself together. I didn't work, I simply stayed at home and looked after the boys." In 1987 Channel 4 put up some money for a short film and, with Portman Productions, agreed to co-produce Leigh's first feature film since Bleak Moments.^[22]

In 1988 then, he made High Hopes, about a disjointed working-class family whose members live in a run-down flat and a council house. Leigh's subsequent films such as Naked and Vera Drake are somewhat starker, more brutal, and concentrate more on the working-class; another of his recent films, however, is a modern-day comedy, Happy-Go-Lucky. A commitment to social realism and humanism is evident throughout. More specifically, several of his films and television plays examine the domestic relationships of ordinary people, which are brought to a head or transformed by some crisis towards the end of the film.

His stage plays include Smelling A Rat, It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples, Ecstasy, and Abigail's Party.

The anger inherent in Leigh's material, in some ways typical of the Thatcher years, softened after her departure from the political scene. In 2005, Leigh returned to directing for the stage after many years absence with his new play, Two Thousand Years at the Royal National Theatre in London. The play deals with the divisions within a left-wing secular Jewish family when one of the younger members finds religion. It is the first time Leigh has drawn on his Jewish background for inspiration.

Leigh has won several prizes at major European film festivals. Most notably he won the Best Director award at Cannes for Naked in 1993 and the Palme d'Or in 1996 for Secrets & Lies. He won the Leone d'Oro for the best film at the International Venice Film Festival in 2004 with Vera Drake. He has been nominated for the Academy Award seven times, twice each for Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake (Best Original Screenplay and Best Directing) and once for Topsy-Turvy, Happy-Go-Lucky, and Another Year (Best Original Screenplay only). He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.^[23]

Leigh has used a pool of actors regularly over the years, including Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Marion Bailey, Phil Davis, Jim Broadbent, David Thewlis, Sam Kelly Peter Wight, Imelda Staunton, Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Claire Skinner, James Corden and the late Katrin Cartlidge.

Style [link]

Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed. Initial preparation is in private with the director and then the actors are introduced to each other in the order that their characters would have met in their lives. Intimate moments are explored that will not even be referred to in the final film to build insight and understanding of history, character and inner motivation. When an improvisation needs to be stopped, he says to the actors: 'Come out of character,' before they discuss what's happened or what might have happened in a situation.^[24]

The critical scenes in the eventual story are performed and recorded in full-costumed, real-time improvisations where the actors encounter for the first time new characters, events or information which may dramatically affect their characters' lives. Final filming is more traditional as definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. The director reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film.

In an interview with Laura Miller, "Listening to the World: An Interview With Mike Leigh", published on salon.com, Leigh states, "I make very stylistic films indeed, but style doesn't become a substitute for truth and reality. It's an integral, organic part of the whole thing." Leigh's vision is to depict ordinary life, "real life", unfolding under extenuating circumstances.^{[clarification needed]} Speaking of his films, he says, "No, I’m not an intellectual filmmaker. These are emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films. And there’s a feeling of despair…I think there’s a feeling of chaos and disorder."^[25] He makes courageous decisions to document reality. He speaks about the criticism Naked received: "The criticism comes from the kind of quarters where "political correctness" in its worst manifestation is rife. It's this kind of naive notion of how we should be in an unrealistic and altogether unhealthily over-wholesome way."^[26]

Leigh's characters often struggle, "to express inexpressible feelings.Words are important, but rarely enough. The art of evasion and failure in communication certainly comes from Pinter, whom Leigh acknowledges as an important influence. He especially admires Pinter's earliest work, and directed The Caretaker while still at RADA." ^[27]

Leigh has cited Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray among his favourite film makers. The critic David Thomson has written that, with the camera work in his films characterised by 'a detached, medical watchfulness', Leigh's aesthetic may justly be compared to the sensibility of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Michael Coveney: " The cramped domestic interiors of Ozu find many echoes in Leigh's scenes on stairways and in corridors, and on landings, especially in Grown-Ups, Meantime, and Naked. And two wonderful little episodes in Ozu's Tokyo Story, in a hairdressing salon and a bar, must have been in Leigh's subconscious memory when he made The Short and Curlies (1987), one of his most devastatingly funny pieces of work, and the pub scene in Life is Sweet..." ^[28]

Leigh's style has been influential over a number of film companies. The youth film company ACT 2 CAM uses his improvisation techniques to build characters and context for films with young people in the UK. His character work, improvisations and unplanned scenes are a technique followed by East 15 School of Acting, where these methods continue to be taught and used at the forefront of the acting and directing training industry.

Personal life [link]

In September 1973 he married Alison Steadman; they have two sons: Toby (born February 1978)^[29] and Leo (born August 1981). Steadman appeared in seven of his films and several of his plays, including Wholesome Glory and Abigail's Party. They divorced in 2001.^[30] He now lives in Camden with costume designer Charlotte Holdich.

He is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.^[31]

Filmography [link]

Bleak Moments (1971)
Hard Labour (1973)
The Permissive Society (BBC Second City Firsts, 10/04/1975)
Knock for Knock (BBC Second City Firsts, 11/21/1976)
Nuts in May (BBC Play for Today, 13/01/1976)
Abigail's Party (BBC Play for Today, 01/11/1977)
Kiss of Death (1977)
Who's Who (1978)
Grown-Ups (1980)
Home Sweet Home (1982)
Meantime (1983)
Four Days in July (BBC1, 1/29/1985)
The Short and Curlies (1987) – short
High Hopes (1988)
Life Is Sweet (1990)
A Sense of History (1992) – short
Naked (1993)
Secrets & Lies (1996)
Career Girls (1997)
Topsy-Turvy (1999)
All or Nothing (2002)
Vera Drake (2004)
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Another Year (2010)
A Running Jump (2012) – short

Recurring collaborators [link]

Actor	Bleak Moments (1971)	Hard Labour (1973)	Knock for Knock (1976)	Nuts in May (1976)	Abigail's Party (1977)	Kiss of Death (1977)	Who's Who (1978)	Too Much of a Good Thing (radio play) (1979)	Grown-Ups (1980)	Home Sweet Home (1982)	Meantime (1983)	Four Days in July (1985)	The Short and Curlies (1987)	High Hopes (1988)	Life is Sweet (1990)	Naked (1993)	Secrets & Lies (1996)	Career Girls (1997)	Topsy-Turvy (1999)	All or Nothing (2002)	Vera Drake (2004)	Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)	Another Year (2010)
Eric Allan	N			N				N
Emma Amos																	N				N
Michelle Austin																	N			N			N
Marion Bailey											N									N	N
Linda Beckett	N	N												N			N
Elizabeth Berrington																N	N				N
Brenda Blethyn									N								N
Brid Brennan												N							N
Jim Broadbent															N				N		N		N
Katrin Cartlidge																N		N	N
Simon Chandler							N														N
Ron Cook																	N		N
Allan Corduner																			N		N
Phil Davis							N	N	N					N			N				N		N
Edna Doré														N						N			N
Janine Duvitski					N				N
Karina Fernandez																						N	N
Sally Hawkins																				N	N	N
Marianne Jean-Baptiste																	N	N(composer)
Alex Kelly																				N	N
Sam Kelly			N				N		N										N	N
Clifford Kershaw		N				N
Lesley Manville								N	N					N			N		N	N	N		N
Oliver Maltman																						N	N
Eddie Marsan																					N	N
Daniel Mays																				N	N
Gary McDonald																	N			N
Wendy Nottingham													N				N		N		N
Stephen Rea												N			N
Martin Savage																			N	N	N		N
Andy Serkis																		N	N
Lesley Sharp																N					N
Ruth Sheen														N			N			N	N		N
Claire Skinner															N	N
Liz Smith	N	N															N
Timothy Spall										N					N		N		N	N
Imelda Staunton																					N		N
Alison Steadman		N		N	N								N		N		N		N
David Thewlis													N		N	N
Sylvestra Le Touzel													N									N
Joe Tucker																	N	N		N
Peter Wight											N					N	N				N		N

References [link]

^ Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, p.36
^ Coveney, p.66
^ "Festival de Cannes: Naked". festival-cannes.com. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/2574/year/1993.html. Retrieved 2009-08-22.
^ The world according to Mike Leigh, p.8, Michael Coveney, Harper Collins 1996
^ Coveney, World according to Mike Leigh, p.9
^ Buruma, quoted in Coveney, the world according to Mike leigh, p.14
^ Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, p.30 Faber 2008
^ Coveney, p.7
^ "UK director Mike Leigh to head Berlin film jury". Yahoo. http://news.yahoo.com/uk-director-mike-leigh-head-berlin-film-jury-141842169.html. Retrieved 2011-12-11.
^ Filmreference.com
^ Rollingstone.com
^ Jewishjournal.com
^ Thejc.com
^ Mike Leigh comes out on his Jewishness by Linda Grant
^ Coveney, p.41
^ Coveney, p.7, 45
^ Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, p.17
^ Coveney, p.60, and [1]
^ Marlow meets Mike Leigh, Sky Arts
^ Coveney, p.72
^ Coveney, p.80
^ Coveney, p.183-184
^ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows. Retrieved 9 August 2010.
^ Coveney, p.16
^ Gordon, Bette."Mike Leigh", "BOMB Magazine", Winter, 1994. Retrieved July 25, 2011.
^ Salon: Mike Leigh, page 2
^ Coveney, p.6
^ Coveney p.12
^ Coveney, p.18
^ "Alison Steadman: Enter Alison the director". The Independent (London). 31 December 2003. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alison-steadman-enter-alison-the-director-578076.html.
^ http://www.humanism.org.uk/about/people/distinguished-supporters/mike-leigh

External links [link]

Mike Leigh at the Internet Movie Database
Mike Leigh at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
Mike Leigh at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
Mike Leigh at Contemporary Writers
Mike Leigh on Happy-Go-Lucky and on childhood visits at grandparents in Hitchin, ITV Local Anglia interview 2008
Mike Leigh live on Film Unlimited - The Guardian, 17 March 2000.
Extensive Mike Leigh Biography and Filmography
Interview with Leigh on Naked from 1994
A Conversation with Mike Leigh - an in-depth interview with the director
Mike Leigh: A Life in Pictures, BAFTA webcast from the Brighton Festival, May 2008
Mike Leigh interview in June 2008
Interview with Barbara Ellen in New Statesman Magazine - 21 October 2010

v t e Mike Leigh

Television work	Bleak Moments (1971) Hard Labour (1973) The Permissive Society (1975) Knock for Knock (1976) Nuts in May (1976) Abigail's Party (1977) Kiss of Death (1977) Who's Who (1978) Grown-Ups (1980) Home Sweet Home (1982) Meantime (1983) Four Days in July (1985)

Theatrical films	High Hopes (1988) Life Is Sweet (1990) Naked (1993) Secrets & Lies (1996) Career Girls (1997) Topsy-Turvy (1999) All or Nothing (2002) Vera Drake (2004) Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) Another Year (2010)

Plays	Ecstasy (1979) Too Much of a Good Thing (1979, broadcast 1992)

Awards for Mike Leigh

v t e BAFTA Award for Best Direction (1985–2009)

no award (1985) Woody Allen (1986) Oliver Stone (1987) Louis Malle (1988) Kenneth Branagh (1989) Martin Scorsese (1990) Alan Parker (1991) Robert Altman (1992) Steven Spielberg (1993) Mike Newell (1994) Michael Radford (1995) Joel Coen (1996) Baz Luhrmann (1997) Peter Weir (1998) Pedro Almodóvar (1999) Ang Lee (2000) Peter Jackson (2001) Roman Polanski (2002) Peter Weir (2003) Mike Leigh (2004) Ang Lee (2005) Paul Greengrass (2006) Joel Coen / Ethan Coen (2007) Danny Boyle (2008) Kathryn Bigelow (2009)

Complete list (1968–1984) (1985–2009) (2010–2034)

v t e BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay (1983–1999)

Paul D. Zimmerman (1983) Woody Allen (1984) Woody Allen (1985) Woody Allen (1986) David Leland (1987) Shawn Slovo (1988) Nora Ephron (1989) Giuseppe Tornatore (1990) Anthony Minghella (1991) Woody Allen (1992) Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin (1993) Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino (1994) Christopher McQuarrie (1995) Mike Leigh (1996) Gary Oldman (1997) Andrew Niccol (1998) Charlie Kaufman (1999)

Complete list (1983–1999) (2000–2019)

v t e Festival de Cannes (Cannes Film Festival) Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director) 1980–1999

Werner Herzog (1982) Robert Bresson/Andrei Tarkovsky (1983) Bertrand Tavernier (1984) André Téchiné (1985) Martin Scorsese (1986) Wim Wenders (1987) Fernando Solanas (1988) Emir Kusturica (1989) Pavel Lungin (1990) Joel Coen (1991) Robert Altman (1992) Mike Leigh (1993) Nanni Moretti (1994) Mathieu Kassovitz (1995) Joel Coen (1996) Wong Kar-wai (1997) John Boorman (1998) Pedro Almodóvar (1999)

Complete list (1946–1959) (1960–1979) (1980–1999) (2000–2019)

Awards and achievements
Cannes Film Festival
Preceded by Robert Altman for The Player	Best Director Mike Leigh 1993 for Naked	Succeeded by Nanni Moretti for Caro diario
Cannes Film Festival
Preceded by Emir Kusturica for Underground	Palme d'Or Mike Leigh 1996 for Secrets & Lies	Succeeded by Abbas Kiarostami for Taste of Cherry and Shohei Imamura for The Eel
Venice International Film Festival
Preceded by Andrey Zvyagintsev for The Return	Golden Lion Mike Leigh 2004 for Vera Drake	Succeeded by Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain

Persondata
Name	Leigh, Mike
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	20 February 1943
Place of birth	Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, England
Date of death
Place of death

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Leigh

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Leigh, Mike Filmography

Leigh, Mike Filmography

Famous quotes by Mike Leigh:

"There is a popular misconception that film-makers have to look to Hollywood to be commercially successful but this is how we have been conditioned."

"It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies."

"The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across."

"jumping out of an airplane without a parachute."

"I'm the opposite of parched."

"I am not concerned with making esoteric, obscure kinds of films. These are films that can share and talk to anybody about real things."

"The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get."

"I've derived a lot of pleasure and education from the theatre. It's great when audiences really enjoy it. It's part of my life."

"There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things."

"Film-makers should remain true to their principles and never compromise, there is a real revival in the British film industry but there is a danger that we will become colonial servants of Hollywood. We need to maintain our own integrity."

Make changes yourself !

Contents

Early life [link]

Career [link]

Style [link]

Personal life [link]

Filmography [link]

List of plays [link]

Recurring collaborators [link]

Further reading [link]

References [link]

External links [link]

http://wn.com/Mike_Leigh

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