Mike Leigh

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Mike Leigh at the premiere of his film Happy-Go-Lucky in Glasgow in April 2008

Mike Leigh , OBE (born February 20, 1943 in Salford , Greater Manchester , England ) is a British theater and film director , drama and screenwriter , actor and set designer . He is considered an exponent of New British Cinema .

Life

Leigh grew up in a Jewish immigrant family whose name was originally Liebermann, but was Anglicized before he was born; the father was a doctor in a working-class district near Manchester, the mother a nurse. Mike Leigh found the 1950s extremely boring. His recipe, however, was excessive cinema attendance. In interviews, he claimed that there was no film between 1949 and 1960 that he had not seen.

A scholarship took him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, where he studied acting for two years. He then attended Camberwell Art School, the stage design department of the Central School of Arts and Crafts and then the London Film School .

In 1965, his first own play was performed in Birmingham, and others followed. Two pieces later served as models for his own films: Nuts in May (1975) and Abigail's Party (1977). In 1967 Leigh worked as an assistant director for the Royal Shakespeare Company . Leigh has written and staged a total of 22 plays. But the “fleeting” in it frustrated him, so he turned more and more to filmmaking, which he saw as the “more permanent”. “In terms of the things I'm trying to say, there is absolutely no difference between film and theater. But the truth is that I'm a lot happier when I'm making films. Film is my natural habitat. "

In order to be more independent as an auteur filmmaker, he founded the production company Thin Man Films together with producer Simon Channing-Williams in 1988 , which was supposed to deal exclusively with his own films. The two worked together for around 20 years. Dick Pope has been responsible for camera work at Leigh's films since 1991 .

Leigh received a Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Film Festival for the film Vera Drake with Imelda Staunton in the leading role. For Another Year he was invited to the competition at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in 2010 ; the script for it earned him his seventh Oscar nomination in 2011 .

In 2008 his film Happy-Go-Lucky was shown in the competition at the Berlinale . Leading actress Sally Hawkins was awarded the Silver Bear .

In 2012 Leigh was the jury president of the 62nd Berlin Film Festival . In 2014, he received the Puffin Lifetime Achievement Award at the Reykjavík International Film Festival .

Quotes

  • “I don't make moral judgments in my films, I don't draw any conclusions. I ask questions, I worry the viewer, I make them feel guilty, I plant bombs, but I do not provide any answers. I refuse to give answers because I don't know the answers. "(1993)
  • “I work very closely with every single actor to create a character. Bit by bit we develop the whole story of this character, her whole world with all the relationships . Time is also very important, the chronological time of a character's life, the years it has already lived. It's not just about improvisation, it's also about research . But the most important thing is not what the actor does individually, but what the actors do together in the relationships. "

cinemamovies

Leigh at the Berlinale 2012

TV films (selection)

  • 1977: Kiss of Death
  • 1978: Who's Who
  • 1983: Meantime
  • 1985: Four Days in July

Awards (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY HONORS LIST. heraldscotland.com, June 12, 1993, accessed October 31, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Susanne Ostwald: Nothing but the truth. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , February 20, 2013 (accessed April 20, 2014)
  3. ↑ Official press release ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at berlinale.de, December 2, 2012 (accessed December 2, 2012) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berlinale.de
  4. ↑ Geoffrey Macnab: Mike Leigh on Mr Turner, high art and huge audiences. The Independent, October 14, 2014, accessed October 31, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Leigh, Mike
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British author, set designer, director and actor
DATE OF BIRTH February 20, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Salford , Greater Manchester , England