MENDES, SAM

Contributed by: The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia by Steven Jay Rubin

(August 1, 1965–     ): Academy Award–winning British film director and producer who helmed Skyfall and Spectre, two of the highest-grossing films in the James Bond series.

A native of Reading, Berkshire, England, Mendes kicked off his feature film directing career with a bang: American Beauty (1999) won the Best Picture Oscar and netted Mendes a Best Director Oscar to boot. Mendes’s additional feature directing credits include Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), and 1917 (2019). For that last film he was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director (losing to Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho). He previously directed Dame Judi Dench in the play The Cherry Orchard, for which he won a Critics’ Circle Award for Best Newcomer, and he went on to join the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he directed, among many others, Ralph Fiennes (in “Troilus and Cressida”).

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