Ed Harris is an American stage, film and television actor, writer, producer and director, best known for playing supporting characters in feature films such as "Apollo 13", "A Beautiful Mind", and "The Truman Show", as well as many recurring and starring roles in television shows, among them the portrayal of The Man in Black in HBO's "Westworld". He holds a BFA in Drama from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA.
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and former politician. Following his breakthrough role on the TV series "Rawhide" (1959–65), Eastwood starred as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti westerns ("A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly") in the 1960s, and as San Francisco Police Department Inspector Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films ("Dirty Harry," "Magnum Force," "The Enforcer," "Sudden Impact," and "The Dead Pool") during the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, along with several others in which he plays tough-talking no-nonsense police officers, have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity.
Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor, for his work in the films "Unforgiven" (1992) and "Million Dollar Baby" (2004). These films in particular, as well as others including "Play Misty for Me" (1971), "The Outlaw Josey Wales" (1976), "Pale Rider" (1985), "In the Line of Fire" (1993), "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995), and "Gran Torino" (2008), have all received commercial success and/or critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been "Every Which Way but Loose" (1978) and its sequel "Any Which Way You Can" (1980); despite being widely panned by critics they are the two highest-grossing films of his career after adjusting for inflation.
Eastwood has directed most of his own star vehicles, but he has also directed films in which he did not appear such as "Mystic River" (2003) and "Letters from Iwo Jima" (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations and "Changeling" (2008), which received Golden Globe Award nominations. He has received considerable critical praise in France in particular, including for several of his films which were panned in the United States, and was awarded two of France's highest honors: in 1994 he received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal and in 2007 was awarded the Légion d'honneur medal. In 2000 he was awarded the Italian Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
Since 1967 Eastwood has run his own production company, Malpaso, which has produced the vast majority of his films. He also served as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, from 1986 to 1988. Eastwood has seven children by five women, although he has only married twice. An audiophile, Eastwood is also associated with jazz and has composed and performed pieces in several films along with his eldest son, Kyle Eastwood.
Description above adapted from the Wikipedia article Clint Eastwood, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Peter Bogdanovich ComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started his career as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire before becoming a prominent filmmaker as part of the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Bogdanovich worked as a film journalist until he was hired to work on Roger Corman's The Wild Angels (1966). His credited feature film debut came with Targets (1968), before his career breakthrough with the drama The Last Picture Show (1971) which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and the acclaimed films What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). Other films include Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), Mask (1985), Noises Off (1992), The Cat's Meow (2001), and She's Funny That Way (2014).
As an actor, he was known for his roles in HBO series The Sopranos and Orson Welles's last film The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which he also helped finish. He received a Grammy Award for Best Music Film for directing the Tom Petty documentary Runnin' Down a Dream (2007).
Bogdanovich directed documentaries such as Directed by John Ford (1971) and The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018). He also published numerous books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. Bogdanovich's works have been cited as important influences by many major filmmakers.
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Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s he was an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and aestheticization of violence. His films have earned him a variety of Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Palme d'Or Awards and he has been nominated for Emmy and Grammy Awards. In 2007, Total Film named him the 12th-greatest director of all time.
Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Connie McHugh Tarantino Zastoupil, a health care executive and nurse born in Knoxville, and Tony Tarantino, an actor and amateur musician born in Queens, New York. Tarantino's mother allowed him to quit school at age 17, to attend an acting class full time. Tarantino gave up acting while attending the acting school, saying that he admired directors more than actors. Tarantino also worked in a video rental store before becoming a filmmaker, paid close attention to the types of films people liked to rent, and has cited that experience as inspiration for his directorial career.
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Donald McNichol Sutherland (July 17, 1935 – June 20, 2024) was a Canadian actor whose film career spanned over 6 decades. He was nominated for eight Golden Globe Awards, winning two for his performances in the television films Citizen X (1995) and Path to War (2002); the former also earned him a Primetime Emmy Award. An inductee of the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Canadian Walk of Fame, he also received a Canadian Academy Award for the drama film Threshold (1981). Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited him as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2017, he received an Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to cinema. In 2021, he won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Movie/Miniseries for his work in the HBO miniseries The Undoing (2020).
Sutherland rose to fame after starring in films including The Dirty Dozen (1967), M*A*S*H (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Klute (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), Fellini's Casanova (1976), 1900 (1976), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Animal House (1978), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Ordinary People (1980), and Eye of the Needle (1981). He later went on to star in many other films where he appeared either in leading or supporting roles such as A Dry White Season (1989), JFK (1991), Outbreak (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), The Assignment (1997), Without Limits (1998), Big Shot's Funeral (2001), The Italian Job (2003), Cold Mountain (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Aurora Borealis (2006) and The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2015).
He was the father of actors Kiefer Sutherland, Rossif Sutherland, and Angus Sutherland.
Lawrence George Cohen (July 15, 1941 – March 23, 2019) was an American screenwriter, producer, and director of film and television, best known as a B-movie auteur of horror and science fiction films — often containing police procedural and satirical elements — during the 1970s and 1980s, such as It's Alive (1974), God Told Me To (1976), It Lives Again (1978), The Stuff (1985) and A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). After that, he concentrated mainly on screenwriting, including Phone Booth (2002), Cellular (2004) and Captivity (2007).
Description above from the Wikipedia article Larry Cohen, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Taylor Edwin Hackford (born December 31, 1944 in Santa Barbara, CA) is an American film director and producer. He is best known for his work on films such as "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982), "The Devil's Advocate" (1997) and "Proof of Life" (2000), and for directing Jamie Foxx to an Academy Award for Best Actor in "Ray" (2004). Hackford served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 2009 to 2013.
Paul Joseph Schrader (born July 22, 1946) is an American screenwriter, film director, and film critic. He first became widely known for writing the screenplay of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). He later continued his collaboration with Scorsese, writing or co-writing Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader has also directed 24 films, including Blue Collar (1978), Hardcore (1979), American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), and First Reformed (2017); the latter earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Schrader's work frequently depicts troubled men struggling through an existential crisis that is then punctuated by a violent, cathartic event.
Raised in a strict Calvinist family, Schrader attended Calvin College before electing to pursue film studies at UCLA on the encouragement of film critic Pauline Kael. He then worked as a film scholar and critic, publishing the book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972) before making the transition to screenwriting in 1974. The success of Taxi Driver in 1976 brought greater attention to his work, and Schrader began directing his own films beginning with Blue Collar (co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader). His three most recent films have been described by Schrader as a loose trilogy: First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021), and Master Gardener (2022).
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Robert Towne (born Robert Bertram Schwartz; November 23, 1934 - July 1, 2024) was an American screenwriter, producer, director and actor. He was part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning original screenplay for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), which is widely considered one of the greatest screenplays ever written. He later said it was inspired by a chapter in Carey McWilliams's Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article on Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Towne also wrote the sequel, The Two Jakes (1990); the Hal Ashby comedy-dramas The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975); and the first two Mission: Impossible films.
Towne directed the sports dramas Personal Best (1982) and Without Limits (1998), the crime thriller Tequila Sunrise (1988), and the romantic crime drama Ask the Dust (2006).