 |
| Chiwetel Fjiofor, Actor - Solomon Northrup - 12 years a Slave |
HOLLYWOOD |Chiwetel Fjiofor, actor, 12 years a Slave, Chiwetelu Umeadi "Chiwetel" Ejiofor, chew-i-tel ej-i-oh-for; born 10 July 1977) is a British actor of film, television, and theatre. After enrolling at the National Youth Theatre in 1995, and then subsequently gaining a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, aged 19, and only three months into his course, Ejiofor was chosen by Steven Spielberg to play a small part in Amistad as James Covey.
He has received numerous acting awards and nominations, including the BAFTA Orange Rising Star Award in 2006, five Golden Globe Award nominations, and theLaurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in Othello in 2008. In 2008, Ejiofor was presented with an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the arts.[6]Ejiofor is known for his portrayal of Okwe in Dirty Pretty Things (2002), The Operative in Serenity (2005), Lola in Kinky Boots (2005), Luke in Children of Men (2006), Dr. Adrian Helmsley in 2012 (2009) and Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave (2013), for which he received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, along with the BAFTA Award for Best Actor.
He is considered "one of the greatest actors of his generation", and his performance as Othello has been hailed as the best of his generation.
Ejiofor was born in London's Forest Gate, to Nigerian parents. His father, Arinze, was a doctor, and his mother, Obiajulu, was a pharmacist. His younger sister is CNN correspondent Zain Asher.
In 1988, when Ejiofor was 11, during a family trip to Nigeria for a wedding, he and his father were driving to Lagos after the celebrations when their car was involved in a head-on crash with a lorry. His father was killed, but Ejiofor survived. He was badly injured, and received scars that are still visible on his forehead. Ejiofor began acting in school plays at the age of thirteen at Dulwich College and joined the National Youth Theatre. He then got into the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art but had to leave after his first year, after getting a role in Steven Spielberg's film Amistad. He played the title role in Othello at the Bloomsbury Theatre in September 1995, and again at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow in 1996 when he starred opposite Rachael Stirling, who played Desdemona.
=================
 |
| Lupita Almondi Nyong'o - Actor |
March 2, 2014
HOLLYWOOD | Lupita Amondi Nyong'o was born March 1, 1983, in Mexico City, Mexico, to Dorothy and Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, a politician in Kenya. It is a Luo tradition to name a child after the events of the day, so her parents named her Lupita (a diminutive of "Guadalupe," Our Lady of Guadalupe). She is of Luo descent and is the second of six children. Her father was the former Kenyan Minister for Medical Services. At the time of Lupita's birth, he was a visiting lecturer in political science at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, and her family had been living in Mexico for three years.
In 2013, her father was elected to represent Kisumu County in the Kenyan Senate. Nyong'o's mother is currently the managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation and her own communications company. Her cousin Tavia Nyong'o is a scholar and professor at New York University. In 2012, her older cousin, Isis Nyong'o, was named one of Africa's most powerful women by Forbes magazine. Her uncle, Aggrey Nyong'o, was a prominent Kenyan physician, killed in a road accident in 2002.
Nyong'o attended college in the United States. After graduating from Hampshire College with a degree in film and theatre studies, she worked on the production crew of many films, including Fernando Meirelles'sThe Constant Gardener, with Ralph Fiennes, Mira Nair's The Namesake, and Salvatore Stabile's Where God Left His Shoes. She cites Fiennes as another individual who inspired her to pursue a professional acting career. Nyong'o landed her breakout role when she was cast in 12 Years a Slave immediately before graduating from Yale with an MFA in 2012. The film was released in 2013 to great critical acclaim. Nyong'o received rave reviews for her performance, and has been nominated for several awards including a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and two Screen Actors Guild Awards including Best Supporting Actress, which she won. She co-starred in Liam Neeson's 2014 film Non-Stop.
Nyong'o cites the performances of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple with inspiring her to pursue a professional acting career. Wikipedia
===================
 |
| Steve Rodney McQueen |
March 2, 2014
HOLLYWOOD | Steven Rodney "Steve" McQueen CBE (born 9 October 1969)[2] is a British film director, producer, screenwriter, and video artist. He is a winner of the Caméra d'Or and two BAFTAs. His 2013 film, 12 Years a Slave, won him the award for best director from the New York Film Critics Circle,[3] the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Pictureat the 71st Golden Globe Awards, and the award for best film at the 2014 BAFTAs. McQueen is known for his collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender, who has starred in all of McQueen's three feature films as of 2013.
For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist, and in 2006 produced Queen and Country, commemorating the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. For services to the visual arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011.
McQueen's films as an artist were typically projected onto one or more walls of an enclosed space in an art gallery, and often in black-and-white and minimalistic. He has cited the influence of the nouvelle vague and the films of Andy Warhol. He often appeared in the films himself.
His first major work was Bear (1993), in which two naked men (one of them McQueen) exchange a series of glances that might be taken to be flirtatious or threatening.[12] Deadpan (1997) is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen, who is left unscathed because he is standing where there is a missing window.
As well as being in black-and-white, both these films are silent. The first of McQueen's films to use sound was also the first to use multiple images: Drumroll (1998). This was made with three cameras, two mounted to the sides, and one to the front of an oil drum which McQueen rolled through the streets of Manhattan. The resulting films are projected on three walls of an enclosed space. McQueen has also made sculptures such as White Elephant (1998), as well as photographs.
He won the Turner Prize in 1999, although much of the publicity went to Tracey Emin, who was also a nominee. In 2006, he went to Iraq as an official war artist. The following year he presented Queen and Country, a piece that commemorated the deaths of British soldiers who died in the Iraq War by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. His 2007 short film Gravesend depicted the process of Coltanrefinement and production. It premiered at The Renaissance Society in the United States.
His 2008 feature film Hunger, about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. McQueen received the Caméra d'Or (first-time director) Award at Cannes, the first British director to win the award. The film was also awarded the inaugural Sydney Film Festival Prize, for "its controlled clarity of vision, its extraordinary detail and bravery, the dedication of its cast and the power and resonance of its humanity". The film also won the 2008 Diesel Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The award is voted on by the press attending the festival. Hunger also won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for a New Generation film in 2008 and the best film prize at the London Evening Standard Film Awards in 2009.
McQueen represented Britain at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2009, it was announced that McQueen has been tapped to direct Fela, a biopic about the Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti. Despite this, McQueen's second major theatrical release came in 2011 with the film Shame. Set in New York City, it stars Michael Fassbender as a sex addict whose life is suddenly turned upside-down when his estranged sister (Carey Mulligan) reappears.
Steve was the first to ask the big question, 'Why has there not been more films on the American history of slavery?'. And it was the big question it took a Brit to ask
“
”
— Brad Pitt.
McQueen's most recent film is 12 Years a Slave (2013). Based on the 1853 autobiography of the same name by Solomon Northup, the film tells the story of a free black man who is kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery, working on plantations in the state of Louisiana for twelve years before being released.
McQueen is also developing a drama for HBO, which he has cowritten with Matthew Michael Carnahan and intends to direct. McQueen is working on a BBC drama about the lives of black Britons, which follows the lives of a group of friends and their families from 1968 to 2014.
Personal life
In addition to London, since 1997 McQueen has a home in Amsterdam, with his long-time girlfriend, the cultural critic Bianca Stigter, and their two children Already having been appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002, he was created Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to the visual arts. Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment