Susan Seidelman

Susan Seidelman
Born	December 11, 1952 (1952-12-11) (age 56) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Susan Seidelman (born December 11, 1952, Philadelphia) is an American movie director.

Career

Susan Seidelman belongs to the first wave of female independent film makers in the American cinema of the 1980s. She graduated Abington Senior High School in 1969 , and went on to study fashion and arts at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her first attempts in movie making at New York University Tisch School of the Arts Film school were awarded.

In 1982, she made her debut feature film Smithereens, which was critically acclaimed as the first American independent film to be selected for competition at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. This film was written by screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, who received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay to Philadelphia in 1994. Her second film Desperately Seeking Susan was the first step for Madonna into the movie business and it was the first major success for Susan Seidelman. Rosanna Arquette and Aidan Quinn came to prominence with that movie too.

Seidelman's next two movies Making Mr. Right (starring John Malkovich) and Cookie didn't succeed at the box office, and even with She Devil, the film version of Fay Weldon's bestselling novel with Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep, she was not able to link to her success with Susan. Seidelman then went on to work successfully in television for many years, where she directed the pilot and several of the early episodes of the hit TV series Sex and the City.

In 2002, Seidelman returned to feature film making with Gaudi Afternoon a gender-bending detective story set in Barcelona, starring Judy Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Juliette Lewis and Lili Taylor, and in 2006 as the director and producer of Boynton Beach Club, which received critical and box office acclaim for being one of the first movies to deal with sexuality and the aging "Baby Boomer" generation.

Awards and nominations

• Cesar Awards Nomination (Foreign language film) - Desperately Seeking Susan
• Academy Award Nomination - Best short subject - The Dutch Master
• Golden Palm Nomination - Smithereens

Filmography (selected)

• 1982 Smithereens
• 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan
• 1987 Making Mr. Right
• 1989 Cookie
• 1989 She-Devil
• 1998 Sex and the City - Pilot
• 1999 A Cooler Climate
• 2002 Gaudi Afternoon
• 2004 The Ranch
• 2006 Boynton Beach Club

External links

• Susan Seidelman Biography in the New York Times
• Susan Seidelman at the Internet Movie Database