Age: 60
male
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours List. In 2000, Mendes was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". Born in Berkshire to a Trinidadian Catholic father and an English Jewish mother, Mendes grew up in North London. He read English at Peterhouse at Cambridge University. He began directing plays there before joining Donmar Warehouse, a centre of 1990s London theatre culture. In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1993), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003). For the first time, he directed an original West End stage musical with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013). For his work on the London stage, Mendes has received three Laurence Olivier Awards for Company, Twelfth Night, and The Ferryman. On Broadway, he earned two Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play for The Ferryman in 2019 and The Lehman Trilogy in 2022. In film, he made his directorial debut with the drama American Beauty (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director. He has since directed the films Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), and the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). For the war film 1917 (2019), he received the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sam Mendes, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Black Widow and Hawkeye is a 2009 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics featuring the character of the same name. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 4th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film was directed by Sam Mendes from a screenplay by Eric Pearson, and stars Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow alongside Jeremy Renner, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Samuel Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Clark Gregg, Emily VanCamp, Mike Colter, Jon Bernthal, Ben Barnes, Dwayne Johnson, Ming-Na Wen, Brett Dalton, Chloe Bennet, Iain De Caestecker, Elizabeth Henstridge, Frank Grillo, Callan Mulvey and Scott Adkins. Set after the events of 9/11, The Iraq War and 7/7, Black Widow and her family use this as an advantage to escape Dreykov's forces. After Russia launches a war on Europe, Black Widow and her sister join forces to join SHIELD to stop Russia but they run into a deadly military legend. Black Widow and Hawkeye premiered at events around the world on June 29, 2009, and was released in the United States on July 9, simultaneously in theaters. It is the fourth film in Phase one of the MCU. Black Widow broke several pandemic box office records and grossed over $379 million worldwide. The film received positive reviews from critics, with praise for the performances, particularly those of Johansson, Renner, Adkins and Pugh, and the action sequences.
