Lili Fini Zanuck

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Lili Fini Zanuck (with her husband Richard D. Zanuck ) at the 1990 Academy Awards

Lili Fini Zanuck (* 2. April 1954 in Leominster , Massachusetts as Lili Fini ) is an American film producer and film director .

Life

Since her father was stationed with the United States Air Force in Europe, Lili Fini grew up in Greece , Italy and Turkey . After her parents moved to Fort Lauderdale , Florida , they divorced when Lili Fini was 13. She moved to Raleigh , North Carolina with her mother , where she also went to high school. Her family then moved to Washington, DC and later attended the nearby Northern Virginia Community College to study law (previously also briefly at Georgetown University ). However, after less than a year she left to go to work. At the age of 20 she married a man with whom she had only been together for 90 days. She then worked for a jeweler, a construction company and as an office worker for research reports on agriculture in Afghanistan at the World Bank . But the biggest change for Fini came when she was in a car accident in 1975.

As a passenger, her car was hit by a vehicle that drove over the traffic light when it was red and hit the car so hard that she was thrown out of the car, back then without seat belts. After two major surgeries and a long recovery, she reconsidered her life and divorced her husband, quitting her job at the World Bank in September 1977 and moving to Los Angeles . After just two days, she found a job as an office manager at Carnation Co.

Six months later she received a call from Richard D. Zanuck , who was newly divorced from Linda Harrison , and asked her friend, with whom she played tennis frequently, to give Lili Fini's phone number. But on the phone he didn't like her voice and so he wanted to cancel the blind date, but he at least gave her a chance and so they met. And although they kept talking about never getting married again, they were married four months later, on September 23, 1978. Lili Fini took on the name Zanuck and became the stepmother of his previous four children from the previous two marriages, including Harrison Zanuck and Dean Zanuck . But she didn't just want to be a mother, she also wanted to continue working. So she asked her husband's business partner at Zanuck-Brown Co. , David Brown, if she could work for the company. And so she was hired as an unpaid intern for a wide variety of tasks. She was surprised when, after two and a half years in various functions, someone from the studio wanted to pay her wages for the same work, which is why she ended her internship, became a partner of the company and accepted the studio offer. Shortly afterwards she discovered the script for Cocoon , which she really wanted to film. Since Brown and her husband were busy with the production of The Verdict - The Truth and Nothing but the Truth , she began to oversee this project in every single development phase and was able to realize it after four years. Cocoon won two Academy Awards , among other things .

After Brown left the company in 1988, Lili Fini Zanuck became an equal partner and formed The Zanuck Company with her husband . The first joint project was to be Miss Daisy and her chauffeur , the film adaptation of the play. But no matter who they offered the piece to, every studio turned it down. Financing turned out to be extremely difficult and the concessions got bigger and bigger, so that Warner Bros. finally agreed to take over both the financing and the distribution for the film. The film brought in its production costs of 7.5 million US dollars with more than 145 million US dollars at the box office worldwide and was awarded an Oscar for best film . After Julia Phillips in 1974 , Zanuck was only the second woman who managed to win an Oscar as a producer for the best film with The Clou .

In mid-May 2010 it was announced that Zanuck would direct the film adaptation of the posthumously published novel The Assault on Tony’s by John O'Brien .

After Zanuck worked with British guitarist Eric Clapton on the film Rush (1991) and the accompanying soundtrack album Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack RUSH (1991), she filmed Clapton's life and career from 2015 to 2017 and published the documentary Eric in September 2017 Clapton: Life in 12 Bars .

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Susan Reed: Dick and Lili Zanuck Pledge to Mix Matrimony and Moviemaking from Here to Eternity on people.com, August 26, 1985, accessed July 19, 2011
  2. ↑ a b c d e Michael J. Bandler: Director`s Chair - Lili Zanuck Moves Behind The Camera With `Rush` on chicagotribune.com from January 19, 1992 (English), accessed on July 19, 2011
  3. ↑ Lili Fini Zanuck on filmreference.com , accessed July 19, 2011
  4. ↑ a b Lili Fini Zanuck on filmbug.com , accessed on July 19, 2011
  5. ↑ Lili Fini Zanuck ( memento of July 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) on yahoo.com , accessed on July 19, 2011
  6. ↑ Lili Fini Zanuck Planning Assault on Tony's on comingsoon.net from May 14, 2010 (English), accessed on July 19, 2011
  7. ↑ Zorianna Kit: Lili Fini Zanuck to helm 'Assault' on hollywoodreporter.com from October 14, 2010 (English), accessed on July 19, 2011
  8. ^ Life in 12 Bars Press Conference. TIFF, accessed on September 27, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Zanuck, Lili Fini
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fini, Lili
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film producer and director
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Leominster , Massachusetts