Celebrity Biographies
Kathryn Bigelow
Not all girls play with dolls, and not all action movies are necessarily directed by men. Kathryn Bigelow has succeeded in hostile territory, in a genre that until now seemed reserved for male directors. And the tension and spectacularity of some of her films are unparalleled.
Born on November 27, 1951 in the Californian town of San Carlos, Kathryn Ann Bigelow is the only daughter of a librarian and a manager of an industrial paint house. Paintings are precisely what interested her the most in her childhood and youth, on an artistic level. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, she began a prolific activity as a painter. She received good reviews and joined the avant-garde group Art and Language. She is passionate about the Seventh Art, she also graduated in film from Columbia University.
After the short The Set-Up , he made his feature film debut with The Loveless , which he co-directs and co-writes with Monty Montgomery, producer of titles like Wild Heart . It was already an atypical film for a woman, tough guys, in which Willem Dafoe played a member of a biker group.
He then directed a cult film for fans of terror, The Night Travelers , a vampiric road movie with a group of blood addicts who travel across the United States in search of potential victims. Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton headed the cast.
Bigelow showed his ability to direct a good thriller with a steady hand with Blue Steel , Jamie Lee Curtis played a police officer who is forced to shoot a mugger. One of those present at the shooting is a stockbroker with mental balance problems who in the confusion grabs a gun. His hallmarks were already present: a solid description of characters for the viewer to empathize with them in the tense sequences.
In 1989, she married Terminator director James Cameron , who produced for her they call her Bodhi . A cop ( Keanu Reeves ) infiltrates a gang of bank-robbing surfers, led by Bodhi ( Patrick Swayze ). The impressive surfing and skydiving sequences won over critics and audiences alike.
Cameron wrote for her Strange Days , a strange -precisely- combination of their talents where Lenny Nero ( Ralph Fiennes ) was a former policeman who trafficked in recorded memory tapes, which can be revived with a device.
After divorcing Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow has been squandered by Hollywood. She must have felt like a fish out of water in The Weight of Water , a drama with Sean Penn , in which she lacks spark, possibly due to the director’s lack of interest in a bland script. She started to get back in shape with K-19: The Widowmaker , a submarine thriller with Harrison Ford , but because she failed to win public endorsement, the director has been out of the picture for seven years.
One day the journalist Mark Boal told him that he had been stationed in Iraq, with a group of soldiers who dismantled bombs. “My jaw dropped when he told me they were extremely vulnerable and used little more than pliers to defuse bombs with 300 meter power radiuses.” Bigelow understood that this story made for a good movie, and he put Boal to write the script for On Hostile Ground , his next film.
With him he has won more awards than ever. Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Directors Guild Award (DGA), and the first to win the Oscar for Best Director.