Biography of Kathryn Bigelow

September 27, 1951 Kathryn Ann Bigelow was born on September 27, 1951 in San Carlos, California, the only child of a librarian Gertude and entrepreneur Ronald Elliot. The first creative efforts of young Kathryn are addressed to painting: he attended the Art Institute of San Francisco in the fall of 1970, and two years later received the Bachelor of Fine Arts. After his studies of art, she moved to New York in the 1970s: in the Big Apple, he attended the environments of the avant-garde, and later choose to devote himself to cinema. His first film dates back to 1978: it's called "set-up" and is a short film that is greeted with a certain enthusiasm for film festivals, both in the United States than in Europe. After graduating in 1979, at Columbia's Film School, where he studied theory and criticism (Sylvere Lotringer and Susan Sontag, as professors Vito Acconci), Kathryn Bigelow becomes a member of "Art and Language", a cultural group of avant-garde arose in England, and in the meantime is called to teach at California Institute of the Arts. A few years later, in 1983, gives life to his first feature film, titled "The loveless" and set in the 1950s, among motorcyclists who try to escape from small town America. As far as appreciated, the Californian Director expresses an intention to overcome the limitations imposed by the independent productions, who are unable to reach a sufficiently broad: for this reason Hollywood majors, and fits in 1987 he directed his second feature: it is a contemporary horror, called "near dark," whose existential undertones encourage a positive response from critics. Nevertheless, subsequent projects of Bigelow meet more than one obstacle: it is only through the intervention of Oliver Stone, who engages as co-producer, who in 1990 can exit the thriller "Blue Steel", starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a woman COP harassed by a psychopathic killer played by Ron Silver. The Director, however, proves to be at ease with the cadences, the screenplays and the rhythms quite obsessive action films: not by chance already in following year gets behind the camera for "Point break break" movie based on bank robberies, breathtaking chases and protagonist always at the limit: the main character is Keanu Reeves Fbi, secret agent involved in the hunt for Ex-Presidents, a group of robbers that irrupts wearing masks of Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (at the head of which there is Patrick Swayze). The film is definitely a winner at the box office, earning only in United States something like a hundred million dollars. As he continues his collaboration with Stone, who leads her to direct an episode of "Wild Palms" miniseries aired in 1993, Kathryn is dedicated to a new thriller, "Strange Days", written and produced by James Cameron (the future Director of "Titanic" and "Avatar"), her ex-husband: the movie, released in 1995, it looks like a science-fiction tale moralizing, but turns out to be a failure both critics and audiences (which many attribute just in Cameron , noting how the Director is limited). Following years of hiatus (interspersed only by management, in 1997 and 1998, some episodes of "Homicide: life on the street"), with the filmmaker who go back to work only in the new millennium, with a refined and intense: in 2000, in fact, comes "the weight of water", starring Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn, based on the novel (original title: "The weight of water") written by Anita Shreve Portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships. After the claustrophobic "K-19: the widowmaker", 2002 war film starring Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford (set inside a Soviet nuclear submarine), in 2006 the American Director directing on behalf of Pirelli "Mission: zero", short film with Uma Thurman as the protagonist, before starting work, in 2008, for "The Hurt Locker" (which is also a producer), war film that deals with the daily events of a group of American soldiers engaged in Iraq. The film premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival and released in cinemas Americans in June 2009, is initially snubbed by critics, but it appreciates with each passing month: not surprisingly, after the award given by the Directors Guild of America in 2010 Kathryn Bigelow WINS, thanks to "The Hurt Locker," the Academy Award for Best Director , first time ever for a woman. For her it's a triumph, considering that the film also won the awards for best sound, best film, best film editing, best sound editing and best original screenplay. In 2011, the American filmmaker back behind the camera for the tv movie "The miraculous year", before you get to work for "Zero Dark Thirty", out to the movies the following year: the staging of the capture of Osama Bin Laden by the Americans, however, draws on several disputes about torture represented. The movie allowed, however, to Kathryn Bigelow to win the prize of best Director of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review Award for Best Director.

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