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.
An original hard-R jukebox musical that follows the lives and daily struggles of two lost young souls — Hudson, a self-destructive alcoholic and hard rock-wannabe poet, and his ex-girlfriend, Jane, a recently-clean and sober prostitute who's having trouble paying the bills and, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child — as we see how their shattered dreams of the past and their conflicted longing in the present might determine what lies in store for them in their futures. The story, at once a sobering character study and a scathing social critique, is set in the mean streets of early 1980's New York, inspired by the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bob Fosse, Spike Lee, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Julie Taymor, Paul Verhoeven, and especially narrative-wise, the Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The rock opera features covers of numerous timeless songs from various influential bands and groundbreaking artists, such as Robert Tepper, Green Day, Pink Floyd, Ben Moody feat. Anastacia, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, Jefferson Starship, Styx, Heart, Electric Light Orchestra, Nazareth, The Who, Janis Joplin, Eagles, Meat Loaf, Def Leppard, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, Laura Branigan, Simon & Garfunkel, Bee Gees, Elvis Presley, Berlin, Billy Joel, Cream, Queen, and Chris Isaak.
