About Sir Richard Eyre
The prominent theatre, film, opera and television director Sir Richard Eyre becomes the first President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in July 2010.
Richard Eyrestarted out as an actor before settling on a career as a theatre director, producer and writer.He was educated at Sherborne School, Peterhouse (Cambridge) and Lincoln College (Oxford). He was Associate Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from 1967 to 1972 and Artistic Director of Nottingham Playhouse from 1973-1978. He was Director of the National Theatre (which became the Royal National Theatre during his time there) between 1987 and 1997. His many notable productions include the premiere of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians, the twice revived Guys and Dolls, Hamlet (directed twice, first with Jonathan Pryce in the title role in 1980 and then with Daniel Day-Lewis in 1989 followed by Ian Charleson), Richard III (with Ian McKellen; also producing as a film), King Lear (with Ian Holm; also adapted and directed for film), Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (with Paul Scofield, Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Aitkins) and Hedda Gabler (with Eve Best), plus innumerable classical productions and new plays by David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Howard Brenton, Alan Bennett, Christopher Hampton and Nicholas Wright. His most recent stage productions include the musical Mary Poppins (West End and Broadway), The Reporter byNicholas Wright (National Theatre), The Observer by Matt Charman (National Theatre), Noël Coward’s Private Lives (West End with Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen) and the recently opened Welcome to Thebes by Moira Buffini (National Theatre).
Richard Eyre’s film career started withThe Ploughman’s Lunch (written by Ian McEwan) in 1982, which won the Evening Standard Award for Best Film;Iris (2001), a biopic of writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch (starring Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent) andStage Beauty (2004), set in the Restoration and about the first female actress on the British stage. Most recently he directed Notes on a Scandal (2006), the film adaptation by Patrick Marber of the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Zoe Heller that starred Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, and The Other Man (2008), his own screen adaptation with Charles Wood of a short story by Bernhard Schlink, starring Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas and Laura Linney. He was Executive Producer of Atonement (2007), based on Ian McEwan’s novel.
Eyre worked as both a television director and one of the producers of BBC’sPlays for Today between 1978 and 1980. He directed Tony Harrison’sV for Channel 4 Films in 1987. He returned to the BBC in 1988 to direct the Falklands War story Tumbledown (starring Colin Firth), which won him the BAFTA Award for Best Director. Eyre served on the board of Governors of the BBC between 1995 and 2003.
Richard Eyre directed Verdi’s La Traviata, his first opera production, with Sir Georg Solti conducting, in 1994 with Angela Gheorghiu for London’s Royal Opera House (since revived), Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at Aix-en-Province (2001) and most recently Bizet’s Carmen (2010) for the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Elina Garanca.
Eyre’s writing career has resulted in the memoir Utopia and Other Places, first published by Bloomsbury in 1993. Changing Stages, the acclaimed guide to twentieth-century British theatre (co-written with Nicholas Wright), appeared in 2000 to accompany a multi-part television series that he hosted. Published by Bloomsbury in October 2003, National Service is the diary, which he kept when he was Director of the Royal National Theatre from 1987 to 1997. It was awarded the 2003 Theatre Book Prize. Eyre has written adaptations of Ibsen’sHedda Gabler and of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales as The Novice, both for the Almeida Theatre.His most recent book is Talking Theatre: Interviews with Theatre People (Nick Hern Books, 2009), a series of interviews with artists who had played a significant part in making and influencing the theatre of the second half of the twentieth century.
Sir Richard Eyre has been the recipient of numerous honours and directing awards, including five Olivier Awards. In 1982 he won the Evening Standard Award for Best Director for Guys and Dolls, and in 1997 for King Lear and Tom Stoppard's Invention of Love. In 1997 he won an Olivier Lifetime Achievement Award and awards from The Directors' Guild of Great Britain, The South Bank Show, The Evening Standard and The Critics' Circle. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1992 New Year Honoursand knighted in the 1997 New Year Honours,receiving the honour on 4 March 1997. He was Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, during 1997. He became a Patron of the Alzheimer's Research Trust in 2001. He was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998, and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters (honoris causa) by the University of Nottingham on 10 July 2008.
01/07/2010