Celebrity Biographies
roger michel
He shot successful big-budget productions such as “Notting Hill”, but also other smaller and lesser-known titles. His career was linked to that of the playwright Hanif Kureishi, with whom he maintained a close friendship. The British – although born in South Africa – Roger Michell died on September 22, 2021, at the age of 65, without further details being released. “I loved every minute we spent together,” said Julia Roberts upon learning of his death.
The son of a British diplomat, Roger Michell came into the world on June 5, 1956 in Pretoria, where his father was stationed at the time. Due to the continuous changes to which he was forced, he spent his childhood in Beirut, Damascus and Prague. He was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, before taking a BA at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
He began his professional career as an assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre, where he met Antonia Bird and Danny Boyle , and became friendly especially with Simon Curtis and Hanif Kureishi , who would later collaborate on his films. When he finished this stage, Roger Michell wrote and directed the play Private Dick , about the novelist Raymond Chandler , and served for six years as chief conductor with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 1992, he made his TV debut with the miniseries Downtown Lagos , which was followed by The Buddha of the Suburbs , an adaptation of the famous novel by Hanif Kureishi . Persuasion , episode of the BBC Screen Two television series, was released in cinemas. Roger Michell also directed the little-known My Night with Reg , before portraying IRA violence in the excellent Titanic Town , with Julie Walters as a long-suffering Northern Ireland mother of four.
Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant starred in their best-known title, Notting Hill , a memorable romantic comedy where the former gave life to a movie star who accidentally walks into a travel bookstore, whose owner (Grant) falls instantly in love with her. He had the aforementioned Richard Curtis as a screenwriter . After the entertaining thriller On the Edge of Truth , with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson as characters who suffer accumulated misfortunes for 24 hours, he collaborates again with Kureishi, who writes the script for The Mother with Daniel Craig . She was about to direct him back into Quantum of Solace , his second incarnation of James Bond, but after months involved in the project, Roger Michell is not quite happy with the producers and abandons ship. He reprises Craig as the lead in The Intruder , which is a version of an Ian McEwan novel .
Roger Michell married the actress Kate Buffery , with whom he had two children, dedicated to the cinema, the agent Rosanna Michell and the writer, director and actor Harry Michell . After his divorce, he was together with Anna Maxwell Martin, with whom he had two other daughters, Maggie and Nancy.
Hanif Kureishi writes for him Venus , Peter O’Toole ‘s latest work , and also Le Week-End . “I use the profits from the big movies I’ve directed to finance the other ones. My heart is more in the big ones. I feel good doing the big budget movies, but at the same time shooting the other ones is more fun. At the same time you have more control over the content, and you can work more with the writers and the actors”, commented Roger Michell in an interview with José Mª Aresté , director of Decine21.
In his last years of activity, he does not stop. The director is also behind Morning Glory , a failed comedy about the world of television, with Harrison Ford and Rachel McAdams , My Cousin Rachel , Nothing Like a Dame , Blackbird and The Duke , acclaimed at the Venice Film Festival, but which has left premiere pending.