Sam Mendes

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 Years Honours List That same year he 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 and began directing plays there before joining Donmar Warehouse which became a centre of 1990s London theatre culture In theatre he is known for his dark reinventions of the stage musicals Cabaret 1993 Oliver 1994 Company 1995 and Gypsy 2003 He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time 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 and for his work on Broadway he has earned two Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play for his work on 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 crime film Road to Perdition 2002 Jarhead 2005 the drama 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 nominations for Best Director Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Description above from the Wikipedia article Sam Mendes licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia