Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway CBE born 5 April 1942 is a Welsh writerdirector painter and video artist based in Amsterdam Throughout the late 1960s and 70s he produced several experimental documentarymockumentary shorts while working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information This early period culminated in The Falls 1980 a threehour mockumentary indexing the strange effects of the VUE the Violent Unknown Event on 92 people whose names begin with the letters FALL He made his dramatic feature film debut with The Draughtsmans Contract 1982 and throughout the 1980s directed a string of critically acclaimed and frequently controversial films A Zed Two Noughts 1985 The Belly of an Architect 1987 Drowning by Numbers 1988 and his bestknown work the vicious Thatcherera satire The Cook the Thief His Wife Her Lover 1989 In the 1990s he directed the Shakespeare adaptation Prosperos Books 1991 controversial religious satire The Baby of Mâcon 1993 erotic drama The Pillow Book 1996 and 8½ Women 1999 an homage to the films of Federico Fellini a major influence on Greenaway In the early 2000s Greenaway embarked on the ambitious Tulse Luper project a multimedia body of historical fiction revolving around the life of the eponymous fictional hero In addition to novels CDROMs online material and a touring exhibition the project spawned a trilogy of feature films The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1 The Moab Story 2003 The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 2 Vaux to the Sea 2004 and The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 3 From Sark to the Finish 2004 The trilogy was followed by a fourth feature A Life in Suitcases 2005 which abridges the Tulse Luper saga into a single film Since the mid 2000s Greenaways film work has focused on idiosyncratic heavily fictionalised biopics dedicated to some of his favourite artists Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn in Nightwatching 2007 Dutch Baroque engraver Hendrik Goltzius in Goltzius and the Pelican Company 2012 Soviet Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in Eisenstein in Guanajuato 2015 and RomanianFrench sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in Walking to Paris TBD Greenaway has lived and worked in Amsterdam since the mid 1990s He is married to artist Saskia Boddeke with whom he has two children He also has two children from a previous marriage to potter Carol Greenaway