Sam Mendes

For the war film 1917 (2019), he received the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as his second Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes (born 1 August 1965 ) is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter.

Mendes was born on 1 August 1965 in Reading, Berkshire.

He is the son of Valerie Mendes (born Barnett), a publisher and author, and Jameson Peter Mendes, a university professor.

His father is a Roman Catholic of Portuguese descent from Trinidad and Tobago, and his mother is an English Jew.

His grandfather was the Trinidadian writer Alfred Hubert Mendes.

Mendes's parents divorced when he was three years old, after which Mendes and his mother settled in Primrose Hill in North London.

He attended Primrose Hill Primary School and was in the same class as future Foreign Secretary David Miliband and author Zoë Heller.

In 1976, the family relocated to Woodstock near Oxford, where Mendes's mother found work as a senior editor at Oxford University Press.

Mendes was educated at Magdalen College School where he met future theatre designer Tom Piper, who went on to work with Mendes on a National Theatre revival of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.

Mendes had an early interest in cinema and applied to the University of Warwick (then the only university in the UK that offered an undergraduate film course), but was turned down.

He was then accepted by Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours in English.

Having developed a passion for theatre only in his late teens, Mendes became a member of the Marlowe Society at Cambridge and directed several plays.

His first play was David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, and one of his later productions was Cyrano de Bergerac with Tom Hollander and Jonathan Cake among the cast members.

During his time at Cambridge, Mendes also became enthusiastic about cinema in earnest.

He cited Paris, Texas, Repo Man and True Stories as three "seminal film moments" that influenced his stage and film career.

Mendes was noted as a "brilliant schoolboy cricketer" by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, scoring 1,153 runs at 46 and taking 83 wickets at under 16 for Magdalen College School in 1983 and 1984.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1987, Mendes was hired as assistant director at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

In September 1987, Mendes made his professional directing debut with a double bill of two Anton Chekhov plays, The Bear and The Proposal.

In 1989, he was appointed the inaugural director of the Minerva Theatre.

In 1989, following the abrupt departure of director Robin Phillips, Mendes took over a production of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance at Chichester.

Later that year, Mendes made his West End debut at the Aldwych with a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, starring Judi Dench.

London Assurance then transferred to the West End following a six-month run at Chichester, opening at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

The successes of the plays established Mendes as a theatre director of national renown.

He read English at Peterhouse at Cambridge University, and began directing plays there before joining Donmar Warehouse, which became a centre of 1990s London theatre culture.

In 1990, Mendes was appointed artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, a Covent Garden studio space previously used by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He spent two years overseeing the redesign of the theatre, which formally opened in 1992 with the British premiere of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins.

Mendes's tenure at the Donmar saw its transformation into one of the most successful and fashionable playhouses in London.

In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1993), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003).

In 1993, Mendes staged an acclaimed revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret starring Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles and Alan Cumming as Emcee.

He also played cricket for Cambridge University Cricket Club, and in 1997 played for Shipton-under-Wychwood in the final of the Village Cricket Cup, the only winner of the Academy Award for Best Director to have played at Lord's.

In film, he made his directorial debut with the drama American Beauty (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director.

In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours List.

Born in Berkshire to a Trinidadian Catholic father and an English Jewish mother, Mendes grew up in North London.

In 2000, Mendes was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany.

He has since directed the films Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), and the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).

In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain.

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".

He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013).

For his work on the London stage, Mendes has received three Laurence Olivier Awards for Company, Twelfth Night and The Ferryman and for his work on Broadway he has earned two Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play for his work on The Ferryman in 2019, and The Lehman Trilogy in 2022.