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Stephen Poliakoff
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Stephen Poliakoff (born December 1, 1952,in London, England) is an acclaimed British playwright, director and scriptwriter, widely judged amongst Britain's foremost television dramatists.
In 1969, while still a pupil at the capital's Westminster School, he attracted sufficient attention for a play written and directed him there to be reviewed in the national press. Following studies at King's College, Cambridge he continued to write stageplays, becoming writer-in-residence for the National Theatre at the age of 24, but became increasingly interested in the medium of television, with Stronger Than the Sun (1977 - BBC1 Play for Today), Bloody Kids (1980 - ATV), Caught on a Train (1980 - BBC2 Playhouse) starring Peggy Ashcroft, and Soft Targets (1982 - Play for Today). There were also TV adaptations of his stageplays Hitting Town (1976 - Thames Television/ITV Play for Britain) and City Sugar (1978 - Scottish Television/ITV The Sunday Drama).
Poliakoff's first
feature film was
Runners, directed by
Charles Sturridge, starring
James Fox,
Jane Asher, and Kate Hardie. It received a limited theatrical release in 1983, before being shown in
Channel 4's legendary
Film on Four strand. His directorial debut was the much-lauded and now rare
Hidden City (
1988), premiered at the
Venice Film Festival and starring
Charles Dance,
Richard E Grant and Cassie Stuart. His televisual career continued with
She's Been Away (1989) starring
Peggy Ashcroft and also winning awards at Venice, before a return to film with
Close My Eyes (1991), starring
Clive Owen,
Saskia Reeves and
Alan Rickman in an elaborate reworking of the incest theme that had been central to
Hitting Town, followed by
Century (1993), with Owen, Dance and
Miranda Richardson. Less successful were
Food of Love (1997) with Grant,
Nathalie Baye and
Joe McGann and
The Tribe (
1998) starring
Joely Richardson and
Jeremy Northam, the latter eventually screened on BBC2 due to lack of a cinema distribution deal.
He subsequently decided to return to his favoured form of television, this time choosing a flexible serial format resulting in the acclaimed and Prix Italia[1]-winning Shooting the Past (1999), the fresh critical and audience success of Perfect Strangers (2001) and The Lost Prince (2003); the latter recognised with an Emmy award rare for a non-American production. Late-2005 saw the one-off drama Friends and Crocodiles, with its overlapping companion-piece Gideon's Daughter appearing early the following year.
In 2005, he renewed recent criticisms of BBC scheduling and commissioning policy, arguing that the reintroduction of a regular evening slot for one-off plays on BBC1 would provide the reinvigoration of drama output that has become a priority for the corporation.
His two latest dramas are scheduled to be broadcast in 2007: Poliakoff 2006 (working title) on BBC One, and Capturing Mary on BBC Two [2].
Contents
- 1 Personal life
- 2 Other Poliakoff films
- 3 See also
- 4 External links
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Personal life
He is married to fellow scriptwriter
Sandy Welch, with whom he has two children.
He is also - via his mother - a cousin of
Ivor Montagu, who co-wrote the screenplay for
Scott of the Antarctic (1948). His brother,
Martyn Poliakoff, is a
Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Chemistry at the
University of Nottingham. He lives in London.
Other Poliakoff films
- Doppelte Welt, Die (Germany, 1985) (TV)
- She's Been Away (1989 - BBC)
See also
