A Mighty Heart

A Mighty Heart is a memoir by Mariane Pearl, the widow of the slain American journalist Daniel Pearl.

The book has been reviewed by, among others, The Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Spectator and The New York Review of Books.

A Mighty Heart has been made into a film, A Mighty Heart, with Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, Dan Futterman as Daniel Pearl, and Archie Panjabi as their friend and colleague Asra Nomani. The movie also covers efforts by Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) and the Central Intelligence of Pakistan to track the kidnappers and bring them to justice.

References

Mariane Pearl

Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl (born 23 July 1967) is a French freelance journalist and a former reporter and columnist for Glamour magazine. She is the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.

Life and career

Pearl was born in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France, to a Dutch father and a Cuban mother of Afro-Chinese-Cuban descent; her paternal grandfather was a Dutch Jewish diamond merchant. She was raised in Paris and met Daniel Pearl while he was on assignment there.

They married in August 1999, lived for a time in Mumbai, India, where Daniel was the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and later traveled to Karachi, Pakistan, to cover aspects of the War on Terrorism. Their son Adam D. was born in Paris four months after his father had been murdered by decapitation.

Pearl's memoir, A Mighty Heart, which deals with the events surrounding her husband's kidnapping and barbaric execution (by beheading), was adapted for the film A Mighty Heart. Co-produced by Brad Pitt, Andrew Eaton and Dede Gardner and directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film stars Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman as Mariane and Daniel Pearl.

Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie Pitt (/dʒoʊˈliː/ joh-LEE; née Voight; June 4, 1975) is an American actress, filmmaker, and humanitarian. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and has been cited as Hollywood's highest-paid actress. Jolie made her screen debut as a child alongside her father, Jon Voight, in Lookin' to Get Out (1982). Her film career began in earnest a decade later with the low-budget production Cyborg 2 (1993), followed by her first leading role in a major film, Hackers (1995). She starred in the critically acclaimed biographical television films George Wallace (1997) and Gia (1998), and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the drama Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Jolie's starring role as the video game heroine Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) established her as a leading Hollywood actress. She continued her successful action-star career with Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Wanted (2008), and Salt (2010), and received critical acclaim for her performances in the dramas A Mighty Heart (2007) and Changeling (2008), which earned her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Beginning in the 2010s, she expanded her career into directing, screenwriting, and producing, starting with the wartime dramas In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) and Unbroken (2014). Her biggest commercial success came with the fantasy picture Maleficent (2014).

Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was a journalist with American and Israeli citizenship. He was kidnapped by Pakistani militants and later murdered in Pakistan.

Pearl was kidnapped while working as the South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, based in Mumbai, India. He had gone to Pakistan as part of an investigation into the alleged links between Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and Al-Qaeda. He was subsequently killed by his captors.

In July 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl's abduction and murder. In March 2007, at a closed military hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stated that he had personally beheaded Pearl.Al-Qaeda member Saif al-Adel has also been connected with the kidnapping.

Early life and education

Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in the upscale Encino district of Los Angeles, California, where he attended Portola Junior High School and Birmingham High School. His father, Judea Pearl, is currently a professor of Computer Science and Statistics, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, and a Turing Award recipient. His mother Ruth is of Iraqi Jewish descent. The history of the family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in the LA Times article, "Roots in the Holy Land".

Michael Winterbottom

Michael Winterbottom (born 29 March 1961) is an English filmmaker. He began his career working in British television before moving into features. Three of his films — Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People — have been nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Winterbottom often works with the same actors; many faces can be seen in several of his films, including Shirley Henderson, Paul Popplewell, John Simm, Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Raymond Waring and Kieran O'Brien.

Early life

Winterbottom was born in Blackburn, Lancashire. He went to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn, and then studied English at Balliol College, Oxford before going to film school at Bristol University, where his contemporaries included Marc Evans.

Career

Early television career

Winterbottom's television directing career began with a documentary about Ingmar Bergman and an episode of the children's series Dramarama in 1989. He followed this with the television film Forget About Me in 1990, starring Ewen Bremner, which followed two British soldiers who become involved in a love triangle with a young Hungarian hitch-hiker on their way to Budapest for a Simple Minds concert.