Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes (born August 1, 1965, Reading, Berkshire, England) is an English film and theatre director who is known for his innovative treatments of classic stage productions as well as for his thought-provoking films.

Mendes was raised in London by his mother, a writer of children’s fiction; she and his father, a university professor, had divorced when Mendes was five. He attended the University of Cambridge, where he formed a theatre company with playwright Tim Firth. After graduating in 1987 with first-class honours in English, he accepted a job at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, England. When the director of a production of the Dion Boucicault comedy London Assurance walked out, Mendes was summoned to take over. The play was a success and moved to London’s West End, where Mendes quickly made a name for himself, directing Dame Judi Dench in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre followed.

In 1992 Mendes took over as artistic director of the nonprofit Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London. His reputation, solidified by a series of well-received productions, began to attract renowned actors to the unprepossessing venue. Celebrated stagings of Cabaret (debuted 1993) and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1995) catapulted Mendes to further fame, and he had similar success in 1998 when he took Cabaret and William Shakespeare’s Othello to New York. In 1998 Mendes directed film star Nicole Kidman’s London stage debut in a provocative rendition of David Hare’s The Blue Room.

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Mendes’s productions of Oliver! and Cabaret brought him to the attention of film director Steven Spielberg, who gave Mendes the script for American Beauty (1999). The film, which starred Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, attempted to expose the seamy underbelly of life in modern American suburbia. Mendes won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best director for his work on the satire, which was also awarded the Academy Award for best picture.

Mendes proceeded to form his own production company with financial backing from Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio. In 2002 he alternated between theatre and film work, directing stage productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse in addition to helming the gangster movie Road to Perdition. He then left the Donmar as artistic director. His production of Gypsy (2003), staged at the Shubert Theatre in New York and starring Bernadette Peters, was widely acclaimed. He released the film Jarhead, a Gulf War drama, in 2005. Mendes’s next film project was an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road (2008) starring actress Kate Winslet, whom he had married in 2003 (divorced 2010). The drama centres on a free-spirited married couple, played by Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, as they navigate the increasingly homogeneous social milieu of 1950s American suburbia.

In 2009 Mendes directed the screen comedy Away We Go, which follows an expectant couple who undertake a road trip in order to find the place to start their family. For the Bridge Project (2009–12), a series of collaboratively produced plays that were performed in multiple international cities, he served as artistic director and staged The Cherry Orchard and four of Shakespeare’s dramas. He returned to filmmaking with Skyfall (2012), a particularly well-received installment in the long-running James Bond franchise. In 2015 he directed Spectre, another movie in that series.

Continuing his involvement in the theatre, Mendes directed the London production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013), a musical based on Roald Dahl’s children’s classic. He then staged The Ferryman (2017) on London’s West End. The drama, about an Irish rural family in the 1980s, was a huge success, and Mendes won an Olivier Award for his direction. The play premiered on Broadway in 2018, and the following year Mendes earned his first Tony Award for best director. In addition, The Ferryman was named best play. During this time he also directed The Lehman Trilogy, which had its world premiere in the West End in 2018. The play centres on the investment firm Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt during the 2007–08 financial crisis.

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In 2019 Mendes returned to the big screen, directing the acclaimed 1917, about World War I. The film, which he also cowrote, received the Golden Globe for best drama, and Mendes won for best director. It later garnered 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture and nods for best director and best original screenplay for Mendes. In 2020 he returned to Broadway with The Lehman Trilogy. However, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the production was halted and did not resume until 2021. The Lehman Trilogy later won a Tony for best play, and Mendes received the award for best director of a play.

In 2000 Mendes was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his contributions to drama. He was awarded a knighthood in the 2020 New Year Honours List.