Michael Mann is 75!
Today, the American director, screenwriter and producer, winner of British Academy and Venice Film Festival awards, Emmy winner and four-time Oscar nominee Michael Mann celebrates his 75th birthday.Michael Kenneth Mann was born in 1943 in Chicago to a Jewish grocery family. His paternal grandfather was an emigrant from the USA Empire and a participant in the First World War, and his dad was a veteran of the Second World War. Michael received his education at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English literature. At the same time, Mann first saw Stanley Kubrick's film Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Atomic Bomb, and, according to him, fell in love with cinema. After completing his studies, he moved to England, where he entered the London Film School, and then began working in an advertising agency, honing his directing skills on the shooting of commercials, short films and documentaries.  Returning to the States in 1971, Michael Mann began writing for television. He has worked on scripts for TV shows like Starsky and Hutch, Vegas and Police Story. His first directing experience on television for him was a drama called Jericho's Mile, which was released in 1979. The film not only earned Mann an Emmy for the script, but was also honored with a Directors Guild of America award. Two years later, Michael Mann directed his first feature film, the crime drama Thief, which took part in the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the grand prize, Palme d'Or. After several under-rated projects, among which was the adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel The Red Dragon about serial killer Hannibal Lecter, in 1992 Mann finally gained widespread public recognition and attracted the attention of film academics thanks to his ambitious adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper "The Last of the Mohicans". The adventure film starring Daniel Day-Lewis competed for several prestigious film awards and was awarded two BAFTA and Oscar awards for Best Sound.  In 1999, Mann returned to his usual genre and released, perhaps, one of his most famous films - the crime thriller "Skirmish". The film about the confrontation between the best criminal and the police detective in their business was a long-awaited joint work of the outstanding actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Despite the fact that at one time the film was not appreciated by either critics or viewers, now it has become a cult movie, and fans recognize it as a classic of crime cinema. The next project of the director, in which Al Pacino also took part, was the biographical drama "Own Man" about the struggle of the former director of a tobacco company and producer of a popular TV show against the entire tobacco industry. The film received seven Oscar nominations, including for directing, adapted script, and also in the Best Film category.  Despite his love for directing, today's birthday boy has achieved significant success as a producer, including on television. In the mid-80s, under his leadership on the NBC channel, the series Miami Police. Department of Morals ”, which became significant for its time and turned the main characters into fashion icons of those years. Another project that Mann also worked on, the Narkoi miniseries, earned the creators an Emmy. In addition, Michael Mann has produced such artistic films as, for example, nominated for the coveted statuette "Aviator" by Martin Scorsese and the fantastic action movie "Hancock" by Peter Berg.  Twenty years after the release of Miami Police, Mann took on a full-length version of the story, this time not only as a producer, but also as a director and screenwriter. Other directorial works of the hero of the day include the drama "Ali" about the famous American boxer Mohamed Ali, the thriller "Accomplice", for which the National Council of Film Critics of the United States recognized Mann as the best director of the year, and the film about the legendary bank robber John Dillinger performed by Johnny Depp. Michael Mann's latest tape, the spy detective Cyber, was released in 2015. And the birthday man is clearly not going to retire. The director's work plan includes several projects at once, including an unnamed biopic about the Chicago mafia boss Tony Accardo and a mini-series about the Vietnam War. The Topic of Article: Michael Mann is 75!. |
