Sam Mendes was already a highly-respected director on the stage when he was given the chance to direct his first film, American Beauty, in 1999. That film went on to win Mendes an Academy Award for Best Director, as well as four more Oscars, including Best Picture.
Born on August 1, 1965, in Reading, England, Mendes graduated from Cambridge University in 1987, and immediately went into theater. He directed Judi Dench in The Cherry Orchard, which won him the Critic Circle's Award for Best Newcomer. After spending a few years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mendes became the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London, directing such productions as The Glass Menagerie, The Blue Room, and the much-acclaimed revival of Cabaret. Cabaret won four Tony Awards, including one for Best Revival of a Musical, and led to Steven Spielberg's selecting Mendes to direct American Beauty. Mendes directed other feature films, The Road to Perdition, Jarhead and Revolutionary Road. He continues to spend most of his time directing for the stage, including a Broadway revival of Gypsy.
Director Sam Mendes was already a veteran of the Broadway and London stage when he made one of the most auspicious feature film debuts in recent memory with American Beauty, a dark, satirical, and ultimately revelatory vision of suburban discontent. The low-budget Hollywood production struck a chord with audiences and critics, garnering Mendes a truckload of year-end awards.
The soft-spoken director was born in 1965 in England, an only child of Portuguese descent. His parents divorced when he was five. After graduating from Cambridge University, the young Mendes made his mark with several popular, innovative stage productions in London's West End before joining the ranks of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. By his mid-twenties, Mendes had staked a claim among such peers as Danny Boyle and Nicholas Hytner -- future film directors themselves -- and had already coaxed attention-getting performances from such luminaries as Dame Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.
Mendes then became artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse Theater, where he programmed an eclectic mix of Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim, and Tennessee Williams. Critics noted the director's ability to attract big-name talents seeking to prove their mettle, exemplified by Nicole Kidman's daring, multi-character performance in Mendes' London and Broadway productions of The Blue Room.
It was his stark, Tony-winning rendition of Cabaret, however, which prompted Steven Spielberg to hand Mendes the script for American Beauty. Spielberg's DreamWorks company was the only Hollywood studio to respond to sitcom writer Alan Ball's elliptical tale of Middle American redemption; and in Cabaret, Spielberg saw the work not just of an actor's director but of a distinctly cinematic visionary. In the film's production, Mendes rehearsed extensively with his cast, storyboarding the film with the aid of Spielberg and legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall. Though the picture was conceived as a dark, ironic comedy, Mendes discovered in the editing process a more reverent, spiritual side to the material. Through careful marketing, the film enjoyed a long run at the box office; in a year filled with scandal and tragedy, American audiences responded to its caustic but inspiring tone. Critics and the industry took note as well, as was particularly evidenced by the slew of year-end attention garnered by the film and its director: among American Beauty's many honors were 5 Academy Awards, including a Best Picture win and a Best Director Oscar statuette for Mendes.
Immediately following the win, Mendes laid low for a while, choosing to focus on the Donmar Theatre instead of the piles of scripts that were being thrown his way. (Among the projects Mendes turned down was Charlie Kaufman's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which would later become George Clooney's directorial debut.) He re-emerged in 2002 with the big-budget Tom Hanks vehicle Road to Perdition, a dark rumination on the nature of violence and the seemingly-inextricable bonds between fathers (or father figures) and sons. Prepped for a high-profile Oscar-season bow, Perdition was moved up to the summer to make way for another Hanks/Dreamworks epic, Catch Me If You Can. Still, upon its release, the R-rated Perdition garnered a sizable amount of awards talk for its stark, poetic visual sense, its mournful tone, and a muted, restrained performance from the usually-sunny Tom Hanks. Better yet, Dreamworks' careful, "counter-programming" platform release ensured a healthy box-office life for the film, as it opened to $20 million on less than 2,000 screens. ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi
Samuel Alexander "Sam" Mendes, CBE (born 1 August 1965) is an English stage and film director. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning work on his debut film American Beauty (1999) and his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1994), Oliver! (1994), Company (1996) and Gypsy (2003). He's currently working on the 23rd James Bond movie: Skyfall. He has a child with his former wife, Kate Winslet.
In 1992 Mendes was appointed artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, an intimate studio space in London's Covent Garden which he quickly transformed into one of the most exciting venues in the city. His opening production was Stephen Sondheim's Assassins which reveled in the show's dark, comic brilliance and rescued it from the critical disfavor it had suffered on its American opening. He followed this with a series of excellent classic revivals, many of which attracted some of the finest actors and biggest stars of the decade.
In 1993, Mendes staged a highly acclaimed revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret starring Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles, Alan Cumming as Emcee, Adam Godley as Cliff Bradshaw and Sara Kestelman as Frau Schneider. The production was approached with a fresh concept, differing greatly from both the original 1966 production directed by Harold Prince and the famed film version, directed by Bob Fosse. This production opened at the Donmar and received four Olivier Award nominations including Best Musical Revival, before transferring promptly to Broadway where it played for several years at the Kit Kat Club (i.e. the Stephen Sondheim Theater). The Broadway cast included Cumming once again as Emcee, with Natasha Richardson as Sally, Mary Louise Wilson as Frau Schneider and John Benjamin Hickey as Cliff. Cumming and Richardson won Tony Awards for their performances.
1994 saw Mendes stage a new production of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Mendes, a long time fan of the work, worked in close collaboration with Bart and other production team members, William David Brohn, Martin Koch and Anthony Ward, to create a fresh staging of the well-known classic. Bart added new musical material and Mendes updated the book slightly, while the orchestrations were radically rewritten to suit the show's cinematic feel. The cast included Jonathan Pryce (after much persuasion) as Fagin, Sally Dexter as Nancy, and Miles Anderson as Bill Sikes. Mendes, Pryce and Dexter received Olivier Award nominations for their work on Oliver!. This production is the longest-running show ever to play at the London Palladium, closing in 1998. Mackintosh revived Mendes' production recently at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane where it was re-staged by Rupert Goold.
In 2003, Mendes directed a revival of the musical Gypsy. Originally, he planned to stage this production in London's West End with an eventual Broadway transfer, but when negotiations fell through, he decided to bring it straight to New York. The cast included Bernadette Peters as Rose, Tammy Blanchard as Louise and John Dossett as Herbie. Mendes will direct a new stage adaption of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The show is set to open in London in 2013.
Film
Mendes made his directorial debut with the critically acclaimed and box-office success American Beauty, starring Kevin Spacey. The film grossed $356.3 million worldwide and had a 2373% ROI. The film won the Golden Globe Award, the BAFTA Award and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Mendes won a Directors Guild of America Award, a Golden Globe Award, and the Academy Award for directing American Beauty.
Mendes's second film, in 2002, was Road to Perdition, which grossed US$181 million. The aggregate review score on Rotten Tomatoes was 82%; critics praised Paul Newman for his performance. The film was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor, and won one for Best Cinematography.
In 2005, Mendes directed the war film Jarhead. The film received mixed reviews, receiving a Rotten Tomatoes aggregate of 60%, and a gross revenue of US$96.9 million worldwide. The film focused on the boredom and other psychological challenges of wartime, instead of being a traditional combat-action film.
Mendes is starting pre-production on a film adaptation of the acclaimed 1971 Tony-winning Broadway musical Follies and has announced his intentions to film an adaptation of the novel Middlemarch in the near future.
According to ComingSoon.net, Columbia Pictures has purchased the rights to the Preacher graphic novel series and have hired Sam Mendes to direct it. He will also be an executive producer for the American movie remake of the British mini series Lost in Austen.
On 5 January 2010, news broke that Mendes was in negotiations to direct the 23rd installment of the James Bond franchise.[6]
Personal life
Mendes married British actress Kate Winslet on 24 May 2003 in Anguilla in the Caribbean. They met in 2001, when Mendes approached Winslet about appearing in a play at the Donmar Warehouse Theater, where he was then artistic director.[5] Their son, Joe Alfie Winslet Mendes, was born on 22 December 2003. Mendes also has a stepdaughter, Mia Honey Threapleton (b. 12 October 2000), from Winslet's first marriage to assistant director Jim Threapleton. The couple announced their separation on 15 March 2010[7] and are divorced.[8][9][10][11]
In November 2011 a spokeman for Mendes confirmed that he and actress Rebecca Hall had been dating "for some time".[12]
1994: directed revival of Oliver! (with score specially revised and augmented by original composer and lyricist Lionel Bart) at the London Palladium; the show ran for four years, becoming on 8 July 1997 the longest-running show at the venue.
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