Neil Jordan

Neil Patrick Jordan (born 25 February 1950) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer.

He won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Lion and a Silver Bear.

Neil Jordan's career began in the late 1970s working for the Irish television channel, RTÉ.

Included in his work was writing storylines for the children's fantasy series, Wanderly Wagon.

He graduated in 1972 with a BA in History.

He became involved in student theatre there, where he met Jim Sheridan, who also was later to become an important Irish film director.

He wrote Night in Tunisia (1976) which won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979.

Jordan was born in Sligo, the son of Angela (née O'Brien), a painter, and Michael Jordan, a professor.

He was educated at St. Paul's College, Raheny.

Later, Jordan attended University College Dublin, where he studied Irish history and English literature.

During the 1980s, he directed films that won him acclaim, including The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa, both made in England.

The Company of Wolves, a dark and sexually-themed reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale based on short stories by Angela Carter, became a cult favourite.

As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview with the Vampire to commercial failures like We're No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget arthouse pictures.

He was also the driving force behind the cable TV series The Borgias.

Unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in Jordan's work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters that audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying.

His film The Miracle, for instance, followed two characters who struggle to resist a strong, incestuous attraction.

Interview with the Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense, intimate interpersonal relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly (although the pair never have sex, they are clearly lovers of a sort), accompanied by an equally complex vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl.

While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his partner Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience's sympathy despite their predatory nature.

In the remake of The End of the Affair, two people (Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore) engage in a love affair that will end as suddenly as it started, with both not wanting its end.

In addition to the unusual sexuality of Jordan's films, he frequently returns to the Troubles of Northern Ireland.

The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto both concern a transgender character (played by Jaye Davidson and Cillian Murphy, respectively), both concern The Troubles and both feature frequent Jordan leading man Stephen Rea.

The two films, however, are very different, with The Crying Game being a realistic thriller/romance, and Breakfast on Pluto is a much more episodic, stylised, darkly comic biography.

Jordan also frequently tells stories about children or young people, such as The Miracle and The Butcher Boy.

While his pictures are most often grounded in reality, he occasionally directs more fantastic or dreamlike films, such as The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams.

The critical success of Jordan's early pictures led him to Hollywood, where he directed High Spirits and We're No Angels; both were critical and financial disasters.

He later returned home to make the more personal The Crying Game, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.

Jordan won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film.

Its unexpected success led him back to American studio filmmaking, where he directed Interview with the Vampire.

He also directed the crime drama The Brave One starring Jodie Foster.

In 1981, when John Boorman was filming Excalibur in Ireland, he recruited Jordan as a "creative associate".

A year later, Boorman was executive producer on Jordan's first feature Angel, a tale of a musician caught up in the Troubles played by Stephen Rea who has subsequently appeared in almost all of Jordan's films to date.

He is known for writing and directing acclaimed dramas such as Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Michael Collins (1996), The Butcher Boy (1997) and The End of the Affair (1999).

He was honoured with receiving the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996.

Of his religious background, Jordan said in a 1999 Salon interview: "I was brought up a Catholic and was quite religious at one stage in my life, when I was young. But it left me with no scars whatever; it just sort of vanished."

He said about his current beliefs that "God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought."

Neil Gaiman announced during his Today show appearance on 27 January 2009, that Neil Jordan would be directing the film of his Newbery Medal-winning book The Graveyard Book.

Jordan also wrote and directed the 2009 Irish-made film Ondine, starring Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda-Curuś.

He also directed Byzantium, an adaptation of the vampire play of the same name starring Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton and Jonny Lee Miller.

Jordan also created the Showtime series The Borgias (2011) and Sky Atlantic's Riviera (2017).

Jordan is also known as an author.