Ridley Scott

Sir Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is an English filmmaker.

He is best known for directing films in the science fiction, crime and historical drama genres.

His work is known for its atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style.

Scott was born on 30 November 1937 in South Shields, to Elizabeth and Colonel Francis Percy Scott.

His grand-uncle Dixon Scott was a pioneer of the cinema chain and opened many cinemas around Tyneside.

One of his cinemas, Tyneside Cinema, is still operating in Newcastle and is the last remaining newsreel cinema in the UK.

Born two years before World War II began, Scott was brought up in a military family.

His father, an officer in the Royal Engineers, was absent for most of his early life.

His elder brother, Frank, joined the Merchant Navy when he was still young and the pair had little contact.

During this time the family moved around; they lived in Cumberland as well as other areas in England, in addition to Wales and Germany.

After the war the Scott family moved back to County Durham and eventually settled on Teesside.

His interest in science fiction began by reading the novels of H. G. Wells as a child.

In February 1963, Scott was named in the title credits as "Designer" for the BBC television programme Tonight.

After graduation in 1963, he secured a job as a trainee set designer with the BBC, leading to work on the popular television police series Z-Cars and science fiction series Out of the Unknown.

He was originally assigned to design the second Doctor Who serial, The Daleks, which would have entailed realising the serial's eponymous alien creatures.

Shortly before he was due to start work, a schedule conflict meant he was replaced by Raymond Cusick.

In 1965, he began directing episodes of television series for the BBC, only one of which, an episode of Adam Adamant Lives!, is available commercially.

In 1968, Ridley and his younger brother Tony Scott – who would also go on to become a film director – founded Ridley Scott Associates (RSA), a film and commercial production company.

Working alongside Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and cinematographer Hugh Johnson, Ridley Scott made many commercials at RSA during the 1970s, including a 1973 Hovis bread advertisement, "Bike Round" (underscored by the slow movement of Dvořák's "New World" symphony rearranged for brass), filmed in Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset.

In the 1970s the Chanel No. 5 brand needed revitalisation having run the risk of being labelled as mass market and passé.

Directed by Scott in the 1970s and 1980s, Chanel television commercials were inventive mini-films with production values of surreal fantasy and seduction, which "played on the same visual imagery, with the same silhouette of the bottle."

He made his film directorial debut with The Duellists (1977) and gained wider recognition with his next film, Alien (1979).

In 1995, both Scott and his brother Tony received a British Academy Film Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema.

Scott's films Alien, Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise were each selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being considered "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

He was Emmy-nominated for RKO 281 (1999), The Andromeda Strain (2008), and The Pillars of the Earth (2010).

Though his films range widely in setting and period, they showcase memorable imagery of urban environments, spanning 2nd-century Rome in Gladiator (2000), 12th-century Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven (2005), medieval England in Robin Hood (2010), ancient Memphis in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), contemporary Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down (2001), and the futuristic cityscapes of Blade Runner (1982) and different planets in Alien, Prometheus (2012), The Martian (2015) and Alien: Covenant (2017).

Scott has been nominated for three Academy Awards for Directing for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.

Gladiator won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and he received a nomination in the same category for The Martian.

He was also influenced by science-fiction films such as It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Them! He said these films "kind of got [him] going a little" but his attention was not fully caught until he saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, about which he said, "Once I saw that, I knew what I could do."

He went to Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton on Tees and obtained a diploma in design at West Hartlepool College of Art.

The industrial landscape in West Hartlepool would later inspire visuals in Blade Runner, with Scott stating, "There were steelworks adjacent to West Hartlepool, so every day I'd be going through them, and thinking they're kind of magnificent, beautiful, winter or summer, and the darker and more ominous it got, the more interesting it got."

Scott went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London, contributing to the college magazine ARK and helping to establish the college film department.

For his final show, he made a black and white short film, Boy and Bicycle, starring both his younger brother and his father (the film was later released on the "Extras" section of The Duellists DVD).

He won twice, for Outstanding Television Film for the HBO film The Gathering Storm (2002) and for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special for the History Channel's Gettysburg (2011).

In a 2004 BBC poll, Scott was ranked 10 on the list of most influential people in British culture.

Scott is also known for his work in television, having earned 10 Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

A nostalgia themed television advert that captured the public imagination, it was voted the UK's favourite commercial in a 2006 poll.

He has received many accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2018, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III in 2024.

An alumnus of the Royal College of Art in London, Scott began his career in television as a designer and director before moving into advertising as a director of commercials.