The Anglo-Saxon Social Model - The Expanded Universe
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Sir David Frederick Attenborough (born 8 May 1926) is a British politician, broadcaster and natural historian, most famous for his lengthy periods of public service in both government and the CBC. He is the younger brother of the director and actor Richard Attenborough and the older brother of the businessman John Attenborough.
Born in Isleworth, Attenborough attended Clare College, Cambridge and spent two years in the Royal Navy. Having left the Navy in 1949, Attenborough went to work at the CBC, where he remained until he entered Parliament as a Labour MP for Heston & Isleworth at the 1963 general election. He progressed quickly through the ranks and was appointed Energy Minister in 1965, at the age of only 38. He would hold the position for just over 11 years, until Labour was voted out of office in 1976. During his tenure, Attenborough worked closely with industry, trades unions and the Supply Ministry to develop the UK’s nuclear and renewable power infrastructure, while phasing out the domestic consumption of coal and oil.
Out of office in 1976, Attenborough collaborated with the incoming Liberal government, in particular the Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine and Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Russell Johnston, to produce the white paper ‘A Blueprint for Survival’ in December 1976. Advocating a fossil fuel-free UK by 2002, the paper was an important rallying cry behind the elevation of environmental issues to the top of the international political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s. Attenborough would be appointed Environment Commissioner to the Commonwealth Cabinet in June 1980, a position he would hold until 1990. He played a significant part in ensuring that the vast majority of UN countries signed up to the Shanghai Protocol in 1987, an international agreement that set dramatic targets to cut fossil fuel emissions in developed countries and set non-binding targets for developing ones. He also leant on the British government to set ambitious targets which phased out fossil fuel production for domestic use by 2000 and petrol and diesel vehicles by 2010, policies which were widely copied across the rest of the Commonwealth.
After his term as Commissioner expired, Attenborough returned to work at the CBC, being appointed Controller of CBC Two in 1990. However, frustrated with the administrative burden of the job, he resigned his role in 1994 to take up a role with the CBC Natural History Unit. He became the producer and narrator of the ‘Planet Earth’ show, a nature documentary which released series in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. The biggest nature documentary ever made, ‘Planet Earth’ utilised state of the art technologies to develop a comprehensive picture of life on Earth. During this time the Natural History Unit also collaborated with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, among others, to produce documentary series on de-extinct animals, called ‘Walking with Beasts’ (2003) and ‘Walking with Monsters’ (2017). As well as producing these series, Attenborough also served as the presenter, gaining renown for his distinctive narration. For his various work with the Natural History Unit, Attenborough has won five CAFTAs. He retired from the CBC in March 2016.
Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in the UK and Commonwealth, although he himself has dismissed the term. In 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a UK-wide poll conducted by the CBC.
Born in Isleworth, Attenborough attended Clare College, Cambridge and spent two years in the Royal Navy. Having left the Navy in 1949, Attenborough went to work at the CBC, where he remained until he entered Parliament as a Labour MP for Heston & Isleworth at the 1963 general election. He progressed quickly through the ranks and was appointed Energy Minister in 1965, at the age of only 38. He would hold the position for just over 11 years, until Labour was voted out of office in 1976. During his tenure, Attenborough worked closely with industry, trades unions and the Supply Ministry to develop the UK’s nuclear and renewable power infrastructure, while phasing out the domestic consumption of coal and oil.
Out of office in 1976, Attenborough collaborated with the incoming Liberal government, in particular the Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine and Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Russell Johnston, to produce the white paper ‘A Blueprint for Survival’ in December 1976. Advocating a fossil fuel-free UK by 2002, the paper was an important rallying cry behind the elevation of environmental issues to the top of the international political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s. Attenborough would be appointed Environment Commissioner to the Commonwealth Cabinet in June 1980, a position he would hold until 1990. He played a significant part in ensuring that the vast majority of UN countries signed up to the Shanghai Protocol in 1987, an international agreement that set dramatic targets to cut fossil fuel emissions in developed countries and set non-binding targets for developing ones. He also leant on the British government to set ambitious targets which phased out fossil fuel production for domestic use by 2000 and petrol and diesel vehicles by 2010, policies which were widely copied across the rest of the Commonwealth.
After his term as Commissioner expired, Attenborough returned to work at the CBC, being appointed Controller of CBC Two in 1990. However, frustrated with the administrative burden of the job, he resigned his role in 1994 to take up a role with the CBC Natural History Unit. He became the producer and narrator of the ‘Planet Earth’ show, a nature documentary which released series in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. The biggest nature documentary ever made, ‘Planet Earth’ utilised state of the art technologies to develop a comprehensive picture of life on Earth. During this time the Natural History Unit also collaborated with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, among others, to produce documentary series on de-extinct animals, called ‘Walking with Beasts’ (2003) and ‘Walking with Monsters’ (2017). As well as producing these series, Attenborough also served as the presenter, gaining renown for his distinctive narration. For his various work with the Natural History Unit, Attenborough has won five CAFTAs. He retired from the CBC in March 2016.
Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in the UK and Commonwealth, although he himself has dismissed the term. In 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a UK-wide poll conducted by the CBC.
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George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American businessman who served as the ninth Commissioner of Major League Baseball between 2000 and 2008, having previously been the owner of the Texas Rangers franchise since 1989.
Bush’s tenure as Commissioner was controversial and dominated by questions of labor relations. His stance on negotiations with the MLB Players’ Association, nicknamed “shock and awe” by critics, attempted to rewrite the existing collective bargaining agreement from scratch and weigh it heavily towards owners. This approach is generally regarded to have been a failure and a major contributing factor in the players’ strike that saw the cancellation of the entire 2003 MLB season. Former United States Senator George J. Mitchell published the Mitchell Report in 2007, which placed primary blame for the strike on Bush, although it did not exonerate the Players’ Association.
Outside of labour relations, Bush’s tenure saw the introduction of foreign ownership into MLB, when the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the United Kingdom bought the Brooklyn Dodgers in 2002. The other major innovation during his tenure was the formalisation of the regular season at 114 games long. MLB also saw an increase in revenue and attendance during his tenure.
Bush is the son of former Massachusetts Senator George H.W. Bush, grandson of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush and older brother of Massachusetts Governor John E. Bush. He moved to Texas in 1977 and founded Arbusto Energy, a small solar energy company. The business proved successful and went through a number of iterations over the course of the next decade. His political ambitions were frustrated and he failed with attempts to enter the House of Representatives in 1980 and 1988. In 1989, he was part of a consortium which purchased a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers and he served as managing general partner for five years. During this time he often chose to sit in the open stands with fans.
Following the publication of the Mitchell Report, it was announced that Bush’s contract would not be extended and he would stand down when his term expired on 22 January 2008. At the time of his retirement, his approval ratings amongst baseball fans stood at around 20-25%. He was controversially inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2017.
Bush’s tenure as Commissioner was controversial and dominated by questions of labor relations. His stance on negotiations with the MLB Players’ Association, nicknamed “shock and awe” by critics, attempted to rewrite the existing collective bargaining agreement from scratch and weigh it heavily towards owners. This approach is generally regarded to have been a failure and a major contributing factor in the players’ strike that saw the cancellation of the entire 2003 MLB season. Former United States Senator George J. Mitchell published the Mitchell Report in 2007, which placed primary blame for the strike on Bush, although it did not exonerate the Players’ Association.
Outside of labour relations, Bush’s tenure saw the introduction of foreign ownership into MLB, when the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the United Kingdom bought the Brooklyn Dodgers in 2002. The other major innovation during his tenure was the formalisation of the regular season at 114 games long. MLB also saw an increase in revenue and attendance during his tenure.
Bush is the son of former Massachusetts Senator George H.W. Bush, grandson of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush and older brother of Massachusetts Governor John E. Bush. He moved to Texas in 1977 and founded Arbusto Energy, a small solar energy company. The business proved successful and went through a number of iterations over the course of the next decade. His political ambitions were frustrated and he failed with attempts to enter the House of Representatives in 1980 and 1988. In 1989, he was part of a consortium which purchased a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers and he served as managing general partner for five years. During this time he often chose to sit in the open stands with fans.
Following the publication of the Mitchell Report, it was announced that Bush’s contract would not be extended and he would stand down when his term expired on 22 January 2008. At the time of his retirement, his approval ratings amongst baseball fans stood at around 20-25%. He was controversially inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2017.
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Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn (nee Betts) (6 October 1910 - 3 May 2002), known throughout her career as Barbara Castle, was a British politician and stateswoman. She served as Prime Minister from 1963 to 1976 and as leader of the Labour Party from 1963 to 1977. She was the first woman to hold the office and is the fourth longest-serving British prime minister (and the longest-serving of the 20th century), after Sir Robert Walpole (1721-1742), William Pitt the Younger (1783-1801) and the Earl of Liverpool (1812-1827). Her long premiership encompassed both the apogee and the end of the long Labour hegemony of the post-1945 period.
Castle studied PPE at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and immediately afterwards entered a career in politics and journalism. She wrote for the left-wing magazine Tribune and was elected to the London Assembly in 1935 for the borough of St. Pancras. During the World War she worked for the Ministry of Food and was later the housing correspondent at the Daily Mirror. She entered Parliament as the MP for Blackburn at the 1945 election. She served as undersecretary of state at the Treasury in 1947-49 before entering the Cabinet as Education Secretary in 1956. She would remain there, introducing a number of significant reforms to state education in 1961, until surprising many with a run for the leadership after the death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963.
Castle, a cross-factional candidate, won an internal competition against three other candidates and won an increased majority for her party at a general election only a month later. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised continued state involvement in the economy, Keynesian macroeconomic management and commitment to the Commonwealth, in line with the policies of her immediate predecessors. However, her tenure also saw a number of new developments, including the launch of the single Commonwealth currency, the decriminalisaton of abortion, the introduction of civil partnerships and the passing of the Race Relations Act. Following another general election victory in 1967, Castle’s second term saw substantial reform of the House of Lords. In foreign policy, Castle attempted to steer a path for the Commonwealth equidistant between the United States and the Soviet Union, a policy that saw her variously dubbed the “Iron Lady” or the “Red Queen” in the American and Soviet press. Notable foreign policy developments of this period included the departure of the Commonwealth from NATO and the ending of the Rhodesian Bush War in favour of the multi-racial government.
Castle was re-elected once more in 1971 but her third term was almost immediately beset by problems. The Commonwealth banking crisis of 1972 destabilised the single currency and almost caused the collapse of the bloc. She also had to manage the departure of Bengal from the union. This economic and political turbulence contributed to Labour’s defeat in the 1976 general election, where the party lost power after 31 years and the Liberals under Margaret Thatcher came to office. Castle resigned from the leadership of her party in 1977 but remained an influential voice on the backbenches until standing down at the 1981 election.
After leaving the Commons, she was given the life peerage, as Baroness Castle of Blackburn, to which she was entitled as a former prime minister. She was active in the Lords, serving as chairman of the House of Lords Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development and in the Commonwealth delegation for relations with Malta. Castle remained active in politics right up until her death, making her final public appearance at the 2001 Labour Party conference before dying of chronic lung disease on 3 May 2002. Although controversial at the time of her fall from power, Castle’s premiership is viewed favourably in historical rankings of British prime ministers.
Castle studied PPE at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and immediately afterwards entered a career in politics and journalism. She wrote for the left-wing magazine Tribune and was elected to the London Assembly in 1935 for the borough of St. Pancras. During the World War she worked for the Ministry of Food and was later the housing correspondent at the Daily Mirror. She entered Parliament as the MP for Blackburn at the 1945 election. She served as undersecretary of state at the Treasury in 1947-49 before entering the Cabinet as Education Secretary in 1956. She would remain there, introducing a number of significant reforms to state education in 1961, until surprising many with a run for the leadership after the death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963.
Castle, a cross-factional candidate, won an internal competition against three other candidates and won an increased majority for her party at a general election only a month later. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised continued state involvement in the economy, Keynesian macroeconomic management and commitment to the Commonwealth, in line with the policies of her immediate predecessors. However, her tenure also saw a number of new developments, including the launch of the single Commonwealth currency, the decriminalisaton of abortion, the introduction of civil partnerships and the passing of the Race Relations Act. Following another general election victory in 1967, Castle’s second term saw substantial reform of the House of Lords. In foreign policy, Castle attempted to steer a path for the Commonwealth equidistant between the United States and the Soviet Union, a policy that saw her variously dubbed the “Iron Lady” or the “Red Queen” in the American and Soviet press. Notable foreign policy developments of this period included the departure of the Commonwealth from NATO and the ending of the Rhodesian Bush War in favour of the multi-racial government.
Castle was re-elected once more in 1971 but her third term was almost immediately beset by problems. The Commonwealth banking crisis of 1972 destabilised the single currency and almost caused the collapse of the bloc. She also had to manage the departure of Bengal from the union. This economic and political turbulence contributed to Labour’s defeat in the 1976 general election, where the party lost power after 31 years and the Liberals under Margaret Thatcher came to office. Castle resigned from the leadership of her party in 1977 but remained an influential voice on the backbenches until standing down at the 1981 election.
After leaving the Commons, she was given the life peerage, as Baroness Castle of Blackburn, to which she was entitled as a former prime minister. She was active in the Lords, serving as chairman of the House of Lords Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development and in the Commonwealth delegation for relations with Malta. Castle remained active in politics right up until her death, making her final public appearance at the 2001 Labour Party conference before dying of chronic lung disease on 3 May 2002. Although controversial at the time of her fall from power, Castle’s premiership is viewed favourably in historical rankings of British prime ministers.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 - 1 September 1952) was an English composer and conductor. One of the leading conductors of his generation, Coleridge-Taylor’s career bridged a number of eras, including late-19th century romanticism, early 20th century modernism, the fusion of classical music with big band in the 1920s and finally the incorporation of traditional west African music in the 1940s. He was also a pioneer in various forms of musical promotion and distribution, gaining widespread fame in the process. In the decades since his death, Coleridge-Taylor has consistently been one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers: in 2016 a CBC Music Magazine survey of 151 composers ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphonies of all time.
Of mixed race birth, Coleridge-Taylor achieved early success in the 1890s with his three cantatas based on the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha by Henry Longfellow. The first section premiered in 1898 and led to offers to tour the Commonwealth and the United States, as well as to judge numerous music festivals. Frustrated at the racism he faced in the Britain of the time, Coleridge-Taylor left the United Kingdom in 1924 and moved to Atlanta, where he became a key part of the flowering of African American culture known as the Atlanta Renaissance.
During his five years in Atlanta, Coleridge-Taylor was heavily influenced by African American music, developing a then-new fusion of jazz and classical music known as stride. Among the musicians and composers he influenced and collaborated with at this time were Tomas Waller and Roland Hayes. A particularly fruitful collaboration proved to be with Duke Ellington, resulting in the lasting fusion of classical and big band music, ensuring the continued popularity and relevance of the genres for decades to come.
In 1929, Coleridge-Taylor returned to the United Kingdom to take up the role of Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where he would remain until his retirement in 1945. Although his stride and big band-classical compositions found less favour among a British audience than in America, his innovative and demanding standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of Wagner, Brahms and Dvorak.
In his retirement, Coleridge-Taylor began to explore his west African roots more and moved to Sierra Leone in 1947. His last opera, Thelma, premiered in 1950 and was heavily influenced by these sounds.
Coleridge-Taylor was 77 when he died in 1952 and was buried in King Tom Cemetery. He married an Englishwoman, Jessie Walmisley, who predeceased him by ten years and had two children, a daughter Avril and a son Hiawatha, both of whom became composers and conductors.
Of mixed race birth, Coleridge-Taylor achieved early success in the 1890s with his three cantatas based on the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha by Henry Longfellow. The first section premiered in 1898 and led to offers to tour the Commonwealth and the United States, as well as to judge numerous music festivals. Frustrated at the racism he faced in the Britain of the time, Coleridge-Taylor left the United Kingdom in 1924 and moved to Atlanta, where he became a key part of the flowering of African American culture known as the Atlanta Renaissance.
During his five years in Atlanta, Coleridge-Taylor was heavily influenced by African American music, developing a then-new fusion of jazz and classical music known as stride. Among the musicians and composers he influenced and collaborated with at this time were Tomas Waller and Roland Hayes. A particularly fruitful collaboration proved to be with Duke Ellington, resulting in the lasting fusion of classical and big band music, ensuring the continued popularity and relevance of the genres for decades to come.
In 1929, Coleridge-Taylor returned to the United Kingdom to take up the role of Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, where he would remain until his retirement in 1945. Although his stride and big band-classical compositions found less favour among a British audience than in America, his innovative and demanding standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of Wagner, Brahms and Dvorak.
In his retirement, Coleridge-Taylor began to explore his west African roots more and moved to Sierra Leone in 1947. His last opera, Thelma, premiered in 1950 and was heavily influenced by these sounds.
Coleridge-Taylor was 77 when he died in 1952 and was buried in King Tom Cemetery. He married an Englishwoman, Jessie Walmisley, who predeceased him by ten years and had two children, a daughter Avril and a son Hiawatha, both of whom became composers and conductors.
Thomas Edison (February 11, 1847 - October 18, 1931) was an American industrialist and politician. His political ambitions, including an aspiration to become President, were frustrated at an early stage by bad timing but his energies were instead diverted into industry. He is most famous for his 24-year long tenure at the head of the General Electric Bureau from 1885 to 1909. A prolific inventor and engineer as well as administrator, Edison was one of the first people to apply the principles of teamwork to invention, establishing the world’s first industrial research laboratory and making substantial progress towards the electrification of most of the urban United States.
Edison was born in Ohio but was brought up in Michigan. He received little formal schooling and worked from an early age, mostly in journalism. Then a Liberal, he moved to Philadelphia in 1880 where he became interested in European alternating current electrical systems. When the federal government set up the General Electric Bureau (known as the American Electric Bureau until 1892), Edison, who had distinguished himself with his own research contributions in the field of telegraphy and electricity, was chosen to be its head. Under Edison, the GEB established a full-time research and development laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey. At this facility numerous advances were made in the fields of electrification, phonography and synthetic rubber, amongst other things. GEB employees at this time included Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and William Hammer.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Edison found himself increasingly out of step with the populist instincts of many in the Liberal Party. He had a particular distaste for William Jennings Bryan and, when Bryan won the presidency in 1904, Edison seriously considered resigning. Nevertheless, he was selected to chair a committee on industrial safety in 1906 but his 1909 Edison Report was quietly shelved when he championed self-regulation by employers. As a result, Edison resigned from GEB.
Following his resignation, Edison served as chairman of Dow Chemical from 1908 to 1919 and was a member of the board of the Bank of the United States from 1913-1919. He formed and chaired the Military Consulting Board during the Great War, with the aim of streamlining the provision of advice and research to the US military. In addition to his varied activities with the GEB, Edison also made wide-ranging investments in industries such as motion pictures, mining and x-rays. His time at Dow is often credited as being a key cause of the chemical industry's growth in the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
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Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American engineer, administrator and former astronaut. In 1992 she became the first black woman to travel into space and from 1993 to 1995 she served as the first American representative on the Commonwealth’s Gaia Space Station.
Born and raised in Alabama, Jemison graduated from Howard University with degrees in chemical engineering and African-American studies before then earning a medical degree from North Carolina A&T University. She served in the Peace Corps in Liberia and also as a general practitioner before joining NASA in 1987. She orbited Earth for just under eight hours in September 1992 before being selected to serve as a liaison with Gaia. In this capacity she became the first fully American citizen to set foot on the space station and went into space a further three times over the course of 1993 to 1995.
After leaving this role, Jemison resigned from NASA. She subsequently worked as an academic at Spelman College and founded the consulting company The Jemison Group, Inc.. She also wrote several books for children and a memoir. She returned to NASA in 2009, when she was nominated by President Colin Powell to be the agency's Administrator, becoming the first woman to take up the role. She retired in 2017. She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame.
Born and raised in Alabama, Jemison graduated from Howard University with degrees in chemical engineering and African-American studies before then earning a medical degree from North Carolina A&T University. She served in the Peace Corps in Liberia and also as a general practitioner before joining NASA in 1987. She orbited Earth for just under eight hours in September 1992 before being selected to serve as a liaison with Gaia. In this capacity she became the first fully American citizen to set foot on the space station and went into space a further three times over the course of 1993 to 1995.
After leaving this role, Jemison resigned from NASA. She subsequently worked as an academic at Spelman College and founded the consulting company The Jemison Group, Inc.. She also wrote several books for children and a memoir. She returned to NASA in 2009, when she was nominated by President Colin Powell to be the agency's Administrator, becoming the first woman to take up the role. She retired in 2017. She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame.
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (January 2, 1884 - March 25, 1957) was an American film director and producer. Widely considered to be one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, he pioneered the feature-length movie and many enduring techniques, such as the close-up. Directors as varied as Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein and Spencer Williams have all cited him as a major influence. In 1958, the Combined Guild Awards of America renamed its annual award for best director the “Oscar Micheaux Award.”
Micheaux was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of two former slaves. During his teens and twenties, he attempted a number of professions, including farmer in Texas, stevedore in New Orleans and porter on the Southern railroads, before settling as a writer. He published his first two novels in 1913 and 1915, both of which dealt with black homesteaders attempting to make new lives for themselves in Reconstruction America. His third book, published in 1917, dealt with similar themes and became a bestseller. Micheaux was invited to Los Angeles by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to adapt his book.
The resulting film, The Homesteader, was released in 1918 and became an instant success both in the United States and abroad. It proved immensely popular amongst Allied soldiers in France and Germany and is held to be a major factor in the growing perception of the United States as the centre of the burgeoning global film industry. The film depicts the struggle of a mixed group of black and white homesteaders to make better lives for themselves amidst the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan. It is considered among the first “blockbuster” motion pictures and broke all box office records that had been established until then. Evelyn Preer, who starred in the film as the doomed Orleans, later remarked that “they lost track of the money it made.”
Following the success of The Homesteader, Micheaux founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, where he would remain for the rest of his career. He continued to enjoy popular and critical success: his 1927 film, The House Behind the Cedars, dealt with issues of race mixing and became the inaugural winner of the Best Film award at the Combined Guild Awards of America. He later moved into talkies and his last film as a director, The Betrayal, was released in 1948 but by this time he was focusing more on producing and did not enjoy the same level of popular success as he had done with silent films. He died on March 25, 1957 of a cerebral hemorrhage and a public memorial service was held in his honour at the Hollywood Masonic Lodge.
Micheaux’s films were amongst the first to prominently feature contemporary black life in a medium that, until then, had been predominantly white. His films questioned the value-system of both African-American and white communities. A large part of his legacy is that he created many of the forms and stock characters which would later be developed in the “Homesteader” or “Western” films of the 1950s and beyond. Two of his films - The Homesteader and The House Behind the Cedars - were selected by the American Film Institute in 2007 as amongst the 100 greatest American films of all time and six of his films - The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), A Son of Satan (1924) and Birthright (1939), as well as The Homesteader and The House Behind the Cedars - have been chosen by the National Film Registry as being worthy of preservation on the grounds that they are “culturally, historically, or aethetically significant.”
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Polly Platt (January 29, 1939 - July 27, 2011) was an American director, writer, producer and production designer. She is considered part of the wave of “New Hollywood” directors and she directed some of the most critically acclaimed and well-known films of the era, including The Last Picture Show (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and Terms of Endearment (1983). She was also a producer and creator of the long running animated television series The Simpsons from 1989 to her death.
Platt initially worked as a production designer on the films of her second husband Peter Bogdanovich. However, when Bogdanovich fell ill on the set of The Last Picture Show she stepped into the director’s chair. Credited as the director, producer and co-writer, Platt became the first woman to be nominated for the Oscar Micheaux Award when The Last Picture Show came out and became an instant commercial and critical hit.
Platt and Bogdanovich divorced in 1973, by which time she had conclusively stepped out of his shadow. Her biggest commercial success up to that point came in 1976, when she co-directed (with Barbara Streisand) the remake of A Star Is Born starring Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. She also continued to enjoy critical success, with the Jack Nicholson and Brooke Shields drama Pretty Baby (1978) attracting strong critical notices but also controversy for its depiction of paedophilia and nude scenes featuring the then-12 year old Shields.
In the 1980s, Platt was introduced to the writer James L. Brooks and she directed his 1983 script Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Debra Winger. The film was a major critical and commercial success, grossing over $150 million worldwide and receiving eleven nominations at the Combined Guild Awards. Platt became the first woman to win the Oscar Micheaux Award. She continued long-term collaborations in 1987, producing James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News and directing Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, both times to commercial and critical approval.
Afterwards, Platt moved into producing and her greatest success came in 1989, when she developed the animated sitcom The Simpsons with Matt Groening and James L. Brooks. Platt assembled the show’s first writing team, co-wrote eight episodes and acted as producer for the show’s first nine seasons (and as executive producer from then on). Thereafter she directed Evening Star (1996), a sequel to Terms of Endearment, and A Map of the World (1999). By this point, however, her career had moved on to producing and she played a key role in launching the directorial careers of Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. Her final credit was as a producer and co-writer on The Simpsons Movie in 2007.
Platt initially worked as a production designer on the films of her second husband Peter Bogdanovich. However, when Bogdanovich fell ill on the set of The Last Picture Show she stepped into the director’s chair. Credited as the director, producer and co-writer, Platt became the first woman to be nominated for the Oscar Micheaux Award when The Last Picture Show came out and became an instant commercial and critical hit.
Platt and Bogdanovich divorced in 1973, by which time she had conclusively stepped out of his shadow. Her biggest commercial success up to that point came in 1976, when she co-directed (with Barbara Streisand) the remake of A Star Is Born starring Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. She also continued to enjoy critical success, with the Jack Nicholson and Brooke Shields drama Pretty Baby (1978) attracting strong critical notices but also controversy for its depiction of paedophilia and nude scenes featuring the then-12 year old Shields.
In the 1980s, Platt was introduced to the writer James L. Brooks and she directed his 1983 script Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Debra Winger. The film was a major critical and commercial success, grossing over $150 million worldwide and receiving eleven nominations at the Combined Guild Awards. Platt became the first woman to win the Oscar Micheaux Award. She continued long-term collaborations in 1987, producing James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News and directing Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, both times to commercial and critical approval.
Afterwards, Platt moved into producing and her greatest success came in 1989, when she developed the animated sitcom The Simpsons with Matt Groening and James L. Brooks. Platt assembled the show’s first writing team, co-wrote eight episodes and acted as producer for the show’s first nine seasons (and as executive producer from then on). Thereafter she directed Evening Star (1996), a sequel to Terms of Endearment, and A Map of the World (1999). By this point, however, her career had moved on to producing and she played a key role in launching the directorial careers of Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. Her final credit was as a producer and co-writer on The Simpsons Movie in 2007.
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