Mike Newell is the director of such acclaimed films as Dance with a Stranger, The Good Father, Enchanted April, and the international smash hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
The 53-year-old director joined Granada Television as a production trainee in 1963, after graduating with a degree in English from Cambridge University. He went on to direct several television dramas including Them Down There; Ready When You Are, Mr. McGill, about a day in the life of a film extra; Destiny; and The Melancholy Hussar, about Thomas Hardy.
He moved into films in 1976 with The Man in the Iron Mask, starring Louis Jourdan, Ralph Richardson, Richard Chamberlain and Jenny Agutter; The Awakening, with Charlton Heston and Susannah York (1978); Bad Blood (1981); Dance with a Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett and Ian Holm, which was a Cannes prizewinner in 1984; The Good Father, with Anthony Hopkins, Harriet Walter and Jim Broadbent, which won the Prix Italia in 1985; Amazing Grace and Chuck (1986); Soursweet (1988); Enchanted April (1991), which was nominated for three Academy Awards and won Golden Globes for two of its stars, Miranda Richardson and Joan Plowright; and Into the West (1991), starring Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, from a script by Jim Sheridan. His last film, Four Weddings and a Funeral, was a huge critical and box office success and has made its star, Hugh Grant -- the star of his latest film, An Awfully Big Adventure -- one of the most popular leading men of the 1990's.
Hilary Heath co-founded and worked for fifteen years with Duncan Heath Associates Ltd., now owned by ICM, where she represented directors, writers and composers and consulted for MGM/UA, Lorimar, and others. During her last six years with the agency, Heath worked on both sides of the Atlantic, packaging and deficit financing for ICM.
Heath's credits as a producer include Jamaica Inn (executive producer) for HTV/Metromedia, Fortess (associate producer) for HBO/Crawfords Australia, The Fringe Dwellers (executive producer) for Virgin Vision/Australia, The Worst Witch (executive producer) for HBO/Central Television and Criminal Law (producer) for Hemdale.
Following a distinguished television career spanning over twenty years, as a producer and writer, Hinchcliffe makes his feature film producing debut with An Awfully Big Adventure.
Hinchcliffe's television producing credits include the children's series, Dr. Who; the BBC police series, Target; the award-winning six-part drama Private Schultz; the Emmy-nominated series, Nancy Astor; and others. With Portman, Hinchcliffe produced the television films And a Nightingale Sang, Virtuoso, The Gravy Train, Friday on my Mind, and the feature Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland.
Founded in 1944, as London and Overseas Films, Portman started as a film distributor before moving into television in the mid-1950's. For years, Portman's productions were almost exclusively family-oriented TV series, until the early 1980's, when the advent of a hungry market for independently produced television led Portman into the production of miniseries and made-for-TV films. More recently, Portman has begun producing theatrical feature films.
In the past ten years, Portman has produced over 100 hours of television drama, including the Emmy-nominated A Woman of Substance; And a Nightingale Sang, The Gravy Train, Friday on my Mind and September, a miniseries based on the best-selling novel by Rosamunde Pilcher.
Portman's feature film productions include Mike Leigh's High Hopes (Critics' Prize, Venice 1988); Hostage, starring Sam Neill and Talisa Soto; Crimebroker, starring Jacqueline Bisset, and Seventh Floor, starring Brooke Shields. Following An Awfully Big Adventure, Portman's latest production is Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse. The film stars Leonardo di Caprio and David Thewlis and has just completed production in Paris; the film will be released in the United States by Fine Line Features.
Dick Pope's many credits include feature films -- Mike Leigh's Naked and Life is Sweet, Paul Michael Glaser's The Air Up There, Stephen Bayly's Coming Up Roses, and Ridley Scott's The Reflecting Skin -- as well as numerous documentaries, music videos and concert specials. He also served as Second Unit Photographer for films including Mountains of the Moon and 1984.
Jon Gregory has served as editor on some of Britain's most celebrated film and television productions, including Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral; Mike Leigh's Naked, Life is Sweet and High Hopes; and Hanif Kureshi's London Kills Me.
Mark Geraghty has an extensive background as aproduction designer and art director in both film and television.
His feature film work includes production designer on The Snapper directed by Steven Frears, art director on The Committments directed by Alan Parker, My Left Foot directed by Jim Sheridan and Into the West directed by Mike Newell. Geraghty's television credits include production designer on The Family, a television drama by Roddy Doyle and art director for Young Indiana Jones, a one hour television episode set in 1916.
Joan Bergin, who studied both architecture and theatre, has worked exclusively in films and theatre for the past 20 years. She is a two-time recipient of the Harvey Theatre Award, winning in 1985 for Bugsy Malone and in 1986 for Brighton Beach Memoirs. Bergin served as vice president of the British Society of Designers from 1988 to 1990.
Her costume design credits include The Family directed by Mike Winterbottom, In the Name of the Father, The Field and My Left Foot all directed by Jim Sheridan.
Composer Richard Hartley has earned a reputation for providing some of the most memorable music scores to a wide range of film, television and theatre productions. His credits include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bad Timing, Dance with a Stranger, The Good Father, and Soursweet. He has also worked in the recording studio with artists including Bananarama, Little Richard, and Meat Loaf.
Born in Guernsey to parents who were both actors in the English repertory theatre, Charles Wood was very well acquainted with the world depicted by Beryl Bainbridge in her novel, An Awfully Big Adventure.
Wood spent much of his early childhood traversing the country with his parents from one theatre to another until the beginning of WWII, when his father joined the army. He then followed in his father's footsteps, joining the army in 1949, after which he went to art school to train as a scenic artist. He pursued that career until 1960, when he wrote his first screenplay, for The Knack. The film, starring Michael Crawford and Rita Tushingham and directed by Richard Lester, earned Wood the Grand Prix Award from the Cannes Writers Guild for Best Comedy.
Today, Wood is one of Britain's most notable writers for film, television and theatre. He has written the screenplay for such films as the Beatles' Help!, The Charge of the Light Brigade, How I Won the War, Cuba, and Wagner, which starred Richard Burton, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. He has written for countless British television shows and his theatre credits include Meals on Wheels, Jingo and Across from the Garden of Allah.
Beryl Bainbridge was an actress before she began to write. Since the early 1970's, she has written thirteen novels, two works of non-fiction and five television plays. A collection of her short stories has also been published and a film of her novel, The Dressmaker, was released in 1988. She won The Guardian's Fiction Prize for her novel The Bottle Factory Outing and the Whitbread Price for Injury Time.
In 1990, An Awfully Big Adventure was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. Her next novel, The Birthday Boys, about Captain Scott and his expedition to the South Pole, was published at the end of 1991 and also nominated for the Whitbread Prize. In 1994, The Birthday Boys was published in the United States to great critical acclaim.
This year Penguin Books will publish Bainbridge's Collected Stories, which contains the novella Filthy Lucre, written by Bainbridge at the age of twelve.
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