The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
On September 22, British local time, Roger Michell, a director who had filmed works such as "Notting Hill", died tragically at the age of 65.
Roger Michelle
Roger Michelle's agency released the news of his death on behalf of his family, but did not disclose the cause of death. The bad news came as a shock to the outside world, as he had taken his new film "The Duke" to the Telluride Film Festival in the United States three weeks ago and talked about the completion of a documentary about Queen Elizabeth II at a media conference; there had been no previous health problems.
Poster for Roger Michelle's latest work, The Duke
Roger Michelle was born on 5 June 1956 in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a British diplomat who happened to be stationed there. But a few years after Michelle's birth, his father was ordered to change jobs elsewhere, so he followed his family around and lived briefly in Beirut, Prague and Damascus, before returning to his home country at the age of 13 to attend a boarding school in Bristol.
During his time at the school, he developed a keen interest in theatre and was involved in directing and writing for theatre clubs. Since then, while studying as an undergraduate at Queen's College, Cambridge, Michelle has also continued to participate in various student theatre companies, and has won many student director awards and screenplay awards before graduating from university in 1977.
After graduating from university, he worked for the Brighton Actors Theatre Company and the historic Royal Court Theatre Company in London's West End, where he fought for master Samuel Beckett and forged friendships with Hanif Kureishi, a screenwriter of Pakistani origin. Kureshi was two years older than him, but by the age of 18 had joined the Royal Court Theatre Company as a screenwriter.
Roger Michelle (right) collaborates on several works with screenwriter friend Hanif Kureshi
In 1985, Kureshi's screenplay "My Beautiful Laundromat" was brought to the screen by director Stephen Frears and caused a sensation across the UK. Around the same time, Roger Michel, who had left the Royal Court Theatre Company to become a freelancer, entered the famous Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company and became a full-time theatre director.
In the early 1990s, Roger Michel attended the BBC-sponsored Film and Television Director Training Programme and underwent a three-month special training to gain a new understanding of the language of cinema. After the transition, his first film work was a remake of his friend Qureshi's autobiographical novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Since then, he has filmed the 1995 BBC version of the TV film Persuasion based on Jane Austen's work of the same name, which won several awards at the British Television Awards that year, and is also recognized by the audience as one of the best in the endless variety of Jane Austen remakes.
Stills from Roger Michelle's version of Persuasion
Of course, the British romantic comedy Notting Hill, released in May 1999, has always been Roger Michelle's most famous work. Starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, the film tells the story of a big star falling in love with a silly boy. Notting Hill was the second-highest grossing British film that year, second only to Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. The film's $360 million worldwide box office also surpassed the 1994 release of Four Weddings and a Funeral, setting a new record for the highest-grossing British film in history.
Stills from Notting Hill
Audiences familiar with "Notting Hill" may remember that at the end of the film, the bookstore store East Hugh Grant, who successfully embraced the beauty, sat on a park bench, while connecting with his girlfriend's ten fingers, but in the other hand he also flipped through a novel, reading with great concentration, and this "War Lover" he was reading was Roger Michelle's next film project. Unexpectedly, shortly before filming began, he suddenly had a heart attack and had to withdraw from the crew in pain, allowing his compatriot John Madden to take over the project.
In 2002, a recovering Roger Michelle moved to Hollywood to complete the thriller Changing Lanes, starring Ben Affleck and Samuel Jackson.
Poster of "Life In a Change of Line"
In fact, this work, which is now rarely mentioned, has been filmed with a certain depth and no lack of entertainment, and after its release in April of that year, it has also won praise from the media and the audience, and the box office performance is also quite good, but unfortunately, the release time is too far from the awards season, and the lack of award blessings has become a relic in a sense.
However, this experience of breaking into Hollywood made Roger Michelle feel uncomfortable. It was also the year that his multi-year marriage to his wife, Kate Buffery, an actor, came to an end. It's hard to say how much of the gathering was due to the filming of "Life in a Change of Line", but after that, Roger Michelle did not work with Hollywood for nearly a decade, leaving all his body and mind on the British screen and stage.
It was also during that time that he collaborated three times with his old friend Kureshi on "The Mother," "Venus," and "Le Week-end."
It is worth mentioning that "Mother's Spring" starred British actor Daniel Craig, and the two worked together quite happily, so soon after, they collaborated on "Enduring Love".
Stills from Mother's Spring
In fact, 007: Quantum of Solace, originally played by Daniel Craig as Bond, was once directed by Roger Michelle. But he had a serious disagreement with the producers over the script and eventually withdrew from the project. Otherwise, viewers would have had a chance to see how Roger Michelle, known for his length of making romantic comedies, gave Bond Tiehan tenderness.
In addition to the above, Michelle has directed such well-received films as Morning Glory, Hyde Park on Hudson's Shore and My Cousin Rachel.
He once said in an interview: "As a director, my job is to serve the script. Some directors, when you look at his work, feel like he's been waving at the audience, reminding everyone not to forget his existence. But in my opinion, this is not really what a director should do. The director, the director, is to make the actors shine, to make the script shine. As for the director himself, being an invisible person is enough. ”
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang