Alan Parker

Director/Writer/Producer ALAN PARKER wrote and directed his first film, Bugsy Malone, in 1975. The film was a musical pastiche of 1920s gangster films with an entire cast of children. The highly original film received eight British Academy Award nominations and five Awards. His second film was the controversial Midnight Express (1977), which won two Oscars and six Academy Award nominations, including one for Parker as Best Director. The film received six Golden Globe Awards and four awards from the British Film Academy. This was followed in 1979 by Parker's film Fame, a celebration of youth and the arts, which won six Academy Award nominations and two Awards, four Golden Globe nominations, and was later adapted into a successful television series. In 1981 Parker directed Shoot The Moon starring Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, his most personal film to date, and the powerful Pink Floyd: The Wall, the feature film adaptation of the successful rock album that has become a classic of the genre. In 1984 Parker directed Birdy, based on the William Wharton novel and starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine. The film won the Grand Prix Special Du Jury at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. No stranger to controversy, his next film, Angel Heart, written and directed by Parker in 1986 and starring Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet, opened in the United States amidst a storm caused by the 'X' rating initially imposed on it by the MPAA. In 1988 Parker directed the civil rights drama Mississippi Burning, starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards (including Best Director for Parker) and winning for Best Cinematography. Parker was also awarded the D.W. Griffith Award by the National Board of Review for directing. The film was nominated for five British Academy Awards, winning three. It also won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1989 Parker wrote and directed Come See the Paradise, a love story set against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II starring Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita. The Commitments (1990), a story of a young Irish working-class soul band, won Parker the Best Director prize at the Tokyo Film Festival and British Academy Awards for Editing, Screenplay, Director, and Best Picture. In 1993 Parker wrote and directed The Road to Wellville, based on the novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle and starring Anthony Hopkins, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, and Dana Carvey. In 1974 Alan Parker directed the BBC Television Film The Evacuees, written by Jack Rosenthal, which won the International Emmy Award and a BAFTA Award for direction. In 1984, to celebrate "British Film Year," Parker wrote and directed the provocative documentary A Turnip Head's Guide to the British Cinema, which underlined Parker's fiercely independent and outspoken views as he lambasted the British film establishment and film critics. It won the British Press Guild Award for the year's best documentary. Parker is also a novelist and author of the best-selling book written from his own screenplay of Bugsy Malone, and Puddles in the Lane, which was published in 1977. A compendium of his satirical cartoons, Hares in the Gate, was published in 1982. A founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, Parker has lectured at film schools around the world. In 1985 he was honored by the British Academy with the prestigious Michael Balcon Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema, and in November 1995 he was awarded with a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the British film industry.