Charles Sturridge

Charles B. G. Sturridge (born 24 June 1951) is an English director and screenwriter. He is the recipient of a BAFTA Children's Award and four BAFTA TV Awards. He has also been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards.

Charles Sturridge
Born
Charles B. G. Sturridge

(1951-06-24) 24 June 1951
London, England
Education
Occupation
Years active1978–present
Spouse(s)
(
m. 1985)
Children3, including Tom and Matilda Sturridge

Early life and education

Sturridge was born in London, England, to Alyson Bowman Vaughan (née Burke) and Jerome Sturridge.[1] He was educated at Stonyhurst College[2] and University College, Oxford.[3]

Career

Sturridge began his career as an actor. He appeared in Zigger Zagger in 1967 with the National Youth Theatre, while in 1968 he played Markland in Lindsay Anderson's film if.... and portrayed the young Edward VII in Edward the Seventh. Directing episodes of Coronation Street, Strangers, World in Action, Crown Court and The Spoils of War by his late twenties,[4] he gained international recognition for his work on the eleven-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited which won over 17 awards including two Golden Globes and six British Academy awards.

Since then the films Sturridge has directed have included Runners, A Handful of Dust, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Fairy Tale: A True Story, based on the Cottingley Fairies story which won the BAFTA for Best Children's film 1998. In 2009 he wrote and directed a remake of Eric Knight's children's classic Lassie. He also directed the black-and-white segment "La Forza del Destino" from Aria. Other television work includes Soft Targets[5] (1982), A Foreign Field (1985) and Gulliver's Travels (1996), which won six Emmys including Best Series and the Royal Television Society's Team award.

In 2001 he wrote and directed Longitude, based on Dava Sobell's best selling life of the clockmaker John Harrison which won the BANFF TV Festival Best Series award, two PAWS awards and five BAFTAs. In 2000 he formed Firstsight Films whose first production was an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition, which Sturridge wrote and directed. The serial Shackleton (2002), which starred Kenneth Branagh, was shot on location in the Arctic. It won the BAFTA for Best Series and Best Costume, and the Radio Times Audience award for Best Drama 2002, as well as being nominated for seven Primetime Emmys, winning for music and photography.

Sturridge also contributed to Beckett on Film, part of a collaborative effort to film all of Samuel Beckett's plays[6] with Anthony Minghella, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and Neil Jordan and Patricia Rozema. Following Minghella's death in 2009, Sturridge became a director for his final project, the television series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

In 2010 he returned to Manchester and Coronation Street to direct the story of the making of its first episode The Road to Coronation Street. This television film won both the RTS and BAFTA awards for Best Single Drama 2011 and a Gold Medal at the New York Film and TV Festival in Las Vegas. In 2011, Sturridge directed a seven-minute short film, "Astonish Me", written by Stephen Poliakoff to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund. The film was shown in Odeon Cinemas in August 2011 and made available on the WWF website and YouTube.

Sturridge's first professional theatre production was a musical version of Charles Dickens' Hard Times which he co-wrote and directed at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry; since then, occasional theatre work includes in 1985 The Seagull (also co-translator) with Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson and Jonathan Pryce and Samuel Beckett's Endgame (2006) with Kenneth Cranham and Peter Dinklage which opened at Dublin's Gate Theatre on the centenary of Beckett's 100th birthday, and later transferred to the Barbican. He also directed Handel's Tolomeo (1998) for Broomhill Opera.

In 2007 Sturridge joined the board of the Directors and Producers Rights Society, which, in 2008, widened its responsibilities and changed its name to Directors UK. The DUK currently has over 4000 members and represents the creative and economic rights of UK film and television directors, with Paul Greengrass as President and Sturridge as the elected Chair.

Personal life

Sturridge married actress Phoebe Nicholls on 6 July 1985;[1] they have two sons, including actor Tom Sturridge, and a daughter, actress Matilda Sturridge.[1][7]

Filmography

Director

Actor
  • 1967: Zigger Zagger - Ensemble
  • 1968: if.... - Markland: Juniors
  • 1975: Edward the Seventh (TV Series) - Bertie (final appearance)
gollark: How are you rendering it? Overlay glasses?
gollark: @DaddySateen YES YOU DO.
gollark: How is it rendered?
gollark: Hologronical.
gollark: I need to leech off cheap iron for my beacon project.

References
  1. "Charles Sturridge Biography (1951-)". FilmReference.com. Archived from the original on 12 January 2016. Retrieved 1 May 2007.
  2. "isbi.com". Stonyhurst College Alumni. Retrieved 7 May 2007.
  3. Revisiting Brideshead Revisited Archived 23 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine
  4. "British Film Institute". Film & TV Database: STURRIDGE, Charles. Archived from the original on 15 November 2007. Retrieved 7 May 2007.
  5. Internet Movie, Database. "Play For Today". Soft Targets. Imdb. Retrieved 27 February 2012.
  6. "Library and Archives Canada". Patricia Rozema Biographie. Archived from the original on 22 November 2006. Retrieved 7 May 2007.
  7. Ellen, Barbara (3 July 2016). "Tom Sturridge: 'If I'd been a parent to myself, I would have been scared'". The Guardian. UK. Archived from the original on 3 September 2017. Retrieved 28 November 2017.
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