Nicole Mary Kidman is an Australian and American actress and producer. Known for her work in film and television productions across many genres, she has consistently ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and six Golden Globe Awards. She received the New York Film Festival Gala Tribute in 2012 and is the first Australian actor to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award honor.
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American writer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction states that "Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose longterm reputation rests largely on the impact of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life." Along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the two most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon. He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered among North Carolina's most famous writers.
Colin Andrew Firth is an English actor and producer. He was identified in the mid-1980s with the "Brit Pack" of rising young British actors, undertaking a challenging series of roles, including leading roles in A Month in the Country (1987), Tumbledown (1988) and Valmont (1989). His portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice led to widespread attention, and to roles in more prominent films such as The English Patient (1996), Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), and Love Actually (2003), co-starring as Mark Darcy in the romantic comedy films Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), and Bridget Jones's Baby (2016), and Harry Bright in the musical comedy films Mamma Mia! (2008) and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again! (2018).
William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.
Laura Leggett Linney is an American actress. She is the recipient of several awards, including two Golden Globe Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards, and has been nominated for three Academy Awards and five Tony Awards.
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian, conservationist, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described DeVoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull."
Andrew Scott Berg is an American biographer. After graduating from Princeton University in 1971, Berg expanded his senior thesis on editor Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which won a National Book Award. His second book Goldwyn: A Biography was published in 1989.
Aline Bernstein was an American set designer and costume designer. She and Irene Lewisohn founded the Museum of Costume Art. Bernstein was the lover, patron, and muse of novelist Thomas Wolfe.
Michael Grandage CBE is a British theatre director and producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Michael Grandage Company. From 2002 to 2012 he was Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in London and from 2000 to 2005 he was Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres.
Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life is a 1929 novel by Thomas Wolfe. It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American coming-of-age story. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel briefly recounts Eugene's father's early life, but primarily covers the span of time from Eugene's birth in 1900 to his definitive departure from home at the age of 19. The setting is a fictionalization of his home town of Asheville, North Carolina, called Altamont in the novel.
Of Time and the River is a 1935 novel by American author Thomas Wolfe. It is a fictionalized autobiography, using the name Eugene Gant for Wolfe's, detailing the protagonist's early and mid-twenties, during which time the character attends Harvard University, moves to New York City and teaches English at a university there, and travels overseas with the character Francis Starwick. Francis Starwick was based on Wolfe's friend, playwright Kenneth Raisbeck. The novel was published by Scribners and edited by Maxwell Perkins. According to Publishers Weekly, it was the 3rd best selling work of fiction in 1935.
Hemingway & Gellhorn is a 2012 American biographical drama television film directed by Philip Kaufman and written by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner, about the lives of journalist Martha Gellhorn and her husband, writer Ernest Hemingway. The film premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and aired on HBO on May 28, 2012.
The Railway Man is a 2013 war film directed by Jonathan Teplitzky. It is an adaptation of the 1995 autobiography of the same name by Eric Lomax, and stars Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Irvine, and Stellan Skarsgård. It premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2013.
Before I Go to Sleep is a 2014 mystery psychological thriller film written and directed by Rowan Joffé and based on the 2011 novel of the same name by S. J. Watson. An international co-production between the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Sweden, the film stars Nicole Kidman, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, and Anne-Marie Duff.
The Web and the Rock is an American bildungsroman novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1939. Like its sequel, You Can't Go Home Again it was extracted by Edward Aswell from a larger manuscript after Wolfe's death.
American-born Australian actress and producer Nicole Kidman has appeared in numerous film and television projects, as well as in theatre productions. She made her film debut in the Australian drama Bush Christmas in 1983. Four years later, she starred in the television miniseries Bangkok Hilton, for which she received the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama. Her breakthrough role was as a married woman trapped on a yacht with a murderer in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm. She followed this with her Hollywood debut opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott's auto-racing film Days of Thunder (1990). Her role as a homicidal weather forecaster in Gus Van Sant's crime comedy-drama To Die For garnered Kidman a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical in 1996. She worked with Cruise again on Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992) and Stanley Kubrick's erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
Queen of the Desert is a 2015 American epic biographical drama film written and directed by Werner Herzog and is based on the life of British traveller, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer and political officer Gertrude Bell. The film follows Bell's life chronologically, from her early twenties until her death. It was Herzog's first feature film in six years after his 2009 film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Katherine Kingsley is an English actress.
The Happy Prince is a 2018 biographical drama film about Oscar Wilde, written and directed by Rupert Everett in his directorial debut. The film stars Everett, Colin Firth, Colin Morgan, Emily Watson, Edwin Thomas and Tom Wilkinson. It premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and was shown at the 2018 BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. At the 9th Magritte Awards, it received a nomination in the category of Best Foreign Film.
The Upside is a 2017 American comedy drama film directed by Neil Burger, written by Jon Hartmere. It is a remake of the French 2011 film The Intouchables, which was itself inspired by the lives of Abdel Sallou and Philippe Pozzo di Borgo. The film follows a paralyzed billionaire who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a recently paroled convict whom he hires to take care of him. Nicole Kidman, Golshifteh Farahani, and Julianna Margulies also star. It is the third remake of The Intouchables after the Indian film Oopiri, and the Argentinian film Inseparables (2016).
