Bruce
Robinson
Born: 1 May 1946
Bruce during the filming of How to get ahead in
Advertising...
Robinson
collects Dickens (he has everything he ever published in
first edition), and also grew up in the same town where
Dickens wrote Copperfield. He even went to a school
called the Charles Dickens Secondary Modern
School.
Such is
the mythology that has sprung up around Bruce Robinson's
first film, the openly autobiographical 'Withnail &
I', that it's often hard to separate fact from fiction.
But the facts appear to be these: trained as an actor at
London's Central School of Speech and Drama, he got off
to a good early start when he was given a reasonably
prominent part as Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli's 'Romeo
and Juliet' (1968). But despite this and other parts for
the likes of Ken Russell ('The Music Lovers', 1970) and
François Truffaut (the male lead in 'L'Histoire
d'Adele H', 1975), he found that acting mostly involved
fruitless waiting for the phone to ring interspersed with
the occasional TV commercial, while desperately trying to
make ends meet. So he began writing screenplays in the
mid-1970s, and was lucky enough to secure the patronage
of producer David Puttnam who finally produced Robinson's
script about Cambodia, 'The Killing Fields' in 1984 for
which he was nominated for an Oscar, and won a BAFTA. But
cult success was to come a couple of years later when he
wrote and directed 'Withnail & I', a film about the
squalid lives of two unemployed actors that was elevated
to iconic status by students all over the world and which
shot newcomer Richard E.Grant to stardom. Robinson's
subsequent films, the advertising satire 'How To Get
Ahead in Advertising' and the serial-killer thriller
'Jennifer 8', while less memorable than his debut, both
show that Robinson has more than enough intelligence and
brio to make his future career worth
following.
Recent
projects include 'In Dreams' for Stephen Spielberg and
Neil Jordan, and the screenplay for the forthcoming film
'Force Majeure'. Robinson's first novel, 'The Peculiar
Memories Of Thomas Penman', came out to critical acclaim
in 1997; and his short fiction, 'Paranoia In The
Laundrette', has recently been published. His first piece
of acting for 20 years can be seen in the film 'Still
Crazy' (1998).
Bruce
speaks fluent French, still types on a typewriter, drinks
far too much red wine, smokes like a chimney and is
married to children's book illustrator Sophie
Windham.