Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh OBE FRSL (born 20 February 1943) is an English writer-director with a career spanning film, theatre and television. He has received numerous accolades, including prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, three BAFTA Awards, and nominations for seven Academy Awards. He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry. Leigh's early films include Bleak Moments (1971), Meantime (1983), Life Is Sweet (1990), and Naked (1993). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Secrets & Lies (1996). He received further Oscar nominations for Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (2004), and Another Year (2010). Leigh has been called "a gifted cartoonist ... a northerner who came south, fiercely proud (and critical) of his roots and Jewish background". He is a child of the 1960s and of the explosion of interest in the European cinema and the possibilities of television. Leigh's style is characterized by lengthy improvisations developed over several weeks to build characters and storylines for his films, with his purpose being to capture reality and present "emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films". Leigh studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. His short-lived acting career included the role of a mute in the 1963 Maigret episode "The Flemish Shop". He began working as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s, before transitioning to making televised plays and films for BBC Television in the 1970s and '80s.