David Mamet
David Mamet is a renowned American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director. He was born in Chicago in 1947 and attended Goddard College in Vermont. He is currently married to actress Rebecca Pidgeon, who has appeared in many of his plays and films.
Mamet is most famous for his plays, and the film versions thereof, which are frequently adapted by Mamet himself. These works are known best for clever, vulgar, and rapid-fire worldplay. His plays also tend to be written for smaller casts: American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, and Boston Marriage, three of his best-known plays are all three-person plays. He has published more than thirty plays over his forty-year career.
Beyond adapting (and often directing) the film versions of his own plays, Mamet has also written and directed original works for the screen, including Ronin (writer), Spartan (director), and Redbelt (writer and director). He also wrote the adapted screenplay to Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. He is now in talks to direct another adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank for 2010.
In addition to all of this, he has also written a number of books about the film and theatre industries, which are famous in their own right, some the most famous being Bambi Vs. Godzilla, Three Uses of the Knife, and On Directing Film.
In 1984, Mamet received the Pulitzer Prize for his most well-known play Glengarry Glen Ross. He received Tony Award nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, and Oscar nominations for his screenplays to The Verdict and Wag the Dog.
His newest play, Race, opened on Broadway December 2009, currently stars Dennis Haysbert and Eddie Izzard, and directed by Mamet himself.
The Trope Maker, naturally, of Mamet Speak.
Works include:
Plays
- American Buffalo
- Bobby Gould in Hell
- Boston Marriage
- The Cryptogram
- The Duck Variations
- Edmond
- The Frog Prince
- Glengarry Glen Ross
- Lakeboat
- A Life in the Theatre
- November
- The Old Neighborhood
- Oleanna
- The Poet and the Rent
- Romance
- Reunion
- Sexual Perversity in Chicago
- The Shawl
- Speed-the-Plow
- The Squirrels
- The Voysey Inheritance (adaptation)
- The Water Engine
- The Woods
Film
- The Edge (writer)
- Edmond (writer)
- Glengarry Glen Ross (screenplay)
- Hannibal (co-writer)
- House Of Games (directorial debut/co-writer with Jonathan Katz)
- Things Change (director/co-writer with Shel Silverstein)
- Heist (writer/director)
- Redbelt (writer/director)
- Ronin (script doctor)
- The Spanish Prisoner (director)
- Spartan (director)
- State and Main
- The Verdict
- Wag the Dog
- The Winslow Boy (adapted screenplay/director)
Television
- The Unit (co-created with Shawn Ryan)