Sir Alan Parker Wiki – Sir Alan Parker Biography
Sir Alan Parker, director of Bugsy Malone and Evita, dies aged 76, His many credits include Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning, The Commitments, and Bugsy Malone
The double Oscar nominee’s many other credits include Midnight Express, Mississippi Burning, The Commitments, Angela’s Ashes, and Birdy.
Evita composer Andrew Lloyd Webber tweeted Sir Alan had been “one of the few directors to truly understand musicals on-screen”.
The director died on Friday after a lengthy illness.
Sir Alan Parker Quick Biogrphy
Who was Sir Alan Parker?
Sir Alan Parker was an English filmmaker. His early career, beginning in his late teens, was spent as a copywriter and director of television advertisements. After about ten years of filming adverts, many of which won awards for creativity, he began screenwriting and directing films.
Parker was known for using a wide range of filmmaking styles and working in differing genres. He directed musicals, including Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991) and Evita (1996); true-story dramas, including Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), Come See the Paradise (1990) and Angela’s Ashes (1999); family dramas, including Shoot the Moon (198
2), and horrors and thrillers including Angel Heart (1987) and The Life of David Gale (2003).
His films won nineteen BAFTA awards, ten Golden Globes and six Academy Awards. Parker was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the British film industry and knighted in 2002.
He was active in both British cinema and American cinema, along with being a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain and lecturing at various film schools. In 2013 he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest honor the British Film Academy can give a filmmaker. Parker donated his personal archive to the British Film Institute’s National Archive in 2015.
Sir Alan Parker Early years
Parker was born into a working-class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He grew up on a council estate of Islington, which has always made it easy for him to remain “almost defiantly working-class in attitudes” said the British novelist and screenwriter Ray Connolly. Parker says that although he had his share of fun growing up, he always felt he was studying for his secondary school exams, while his friends were out having a good time. He had an “ordinary background” with no aspirations to become a film director, nor did anyone in his family have any desire to be involved in the film industry. The closest he ever came, he says, to anything related to films was learning photography, a hobby inspired by his uncles: “That early introduction to photography is something I remember.”
Parker attended Dame Alice Owen’s School, concentrating on science in his last year. He left school when he was eighteen to work in the advertising field, hoping that the advertising industry might be a good way to meet girls.
Satirical observations
Sir Alan’s latest film as director is The Life of David Gale, starring in 2003 by Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet.
In 2005, he published Will Write and Direct for Food, a summary of his often satirical observations on filming in the UK and the USA.
In 2018, he donated his comprehensive collection of scripts and worksheets to the British Film Institute National Archive.
According to a family spokesperson, he spent his retirement by reducing his passion for silk screen printing and painting.
