The United Kingdom has had a significant film industry for over a century. While film production reached an all-time high in 1936, the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during which the directors David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed produced their most critically acclaimed works. Many British actors have accrued critical success and worldwide recognition, such as Audrey Hepburn, Maggie Smith, Roger Moore, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Joan Collins, Judi Dench, Julie Andrews, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet. Some of the films with the largest ever box office returns have been made in the United Kingdom, including the third and sixth highest-grossing film franchises.
Dances with Wolves is a 1990 American epic Western film starring, directed, and produced by Kevin Costner in his feature directorial debut. It is a film adaptation of the 1988 book of the same name by Michael Blake that tells the story of Union Army Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the American frontier to find a military post, and of his dealings with a group of Lakota.
Sir Alexander Korda was a Hungarian-British film director, producer and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company.
The Rank Organisation was a British entertainment conglomerate founded by industrialist J. Arthur Rank in April 1937. It quickly became the largest and most vertically integrated film company in the United Kingdom, owning production, distribution and exhibition facilities. It also diversified into the manufacture of radios, TVs and photocopiers. The company name lasted until February 1996, when the name and some of the remaining assets were absorbed into the newly structured Rank Group plc. The company itself became a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox and was renamed XRO Limited in 1997.
Keswick is an English market town and a civil parish in the Allerdale borough of Cumbria, England. Historically it was in Cumberland, and since 1974 has been in Cumbria. It lies within the Lake District National Park, Keswick is just north of Derwentwater and is four miles from Bassenthwaite Lake. It had a population of 5,243 at the 2011 census.
Hollywood North is a colloquialism used to describe film production industries and/or film locations north of its namesake, Hollywood, California. The term has been applied principally to the film industry in Canada, specifically to the areas of Toronto and Vancouver. The level of Canadian production has increased since the ratification of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988. The total value of foreign location and service production in Canada, consisting of films and television programs filmed in Canada mainly by foreign producers, was $4.86 billion in 2019. Of this, British Columbia accounted for $2.81 while Ontario accounted for $2.16 billion of the total.
The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 was an act of the United Kingdom Parliament designed to stimulate the declining British film industry. It received Royal Assent on 20 December 1927 and came into force on 1 April 1928.
The Company of Wolves is a 1984 British gothic fantasy horror film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, Stephen Rea and David Warner. The screenplay was written by Jordan and Angela Carter, and adapted by Carter from her short story of the same name and its 1980 radio adaptation. Carter's first draft of the screenplay, which contains some differences from the finished film, has been published in her anthology The Curious Room (1996).
Julie of the Wolves is a children's novel by Jean Craighead George, published by Harper in 1972 with illustrations by John Schoenherr. Set on the Alaska North Slope, it features a young Inuk girl experiencing the changes forced upon her culture from outside. George wrote two sequels that were originally illustrated by Wendell Minor: Julie (1994), which starts 10 minutes after the first book ends, and Julie's Wolf Pack (1997), which is told from the viewpoint of the wolves.
Douglas Scott Botting was an English explorer, author, biographer and TV presenter and producer. He wrote biographies of naturalists Gavin Maxwell and Gerald Durrell. He was the inspiration behind and writer of the 1972 BBC comedy show The Black Safari, a role-reversal comedy show with Africans touring England. He also featured in much other BBC programming, including Under London Expedition exploring the London sewerage system, as part of the BBC2 nature series The World About Us. He wrote numerous Second World War and early aviation books for Time Life Books. Botting took part, with Anthony Smith, in the first balloon flight over Africa.
Stephen Woolley is an English film producer and director, whose prolific career has spanned over three and a half decades, for which he was awarded the BAFTA award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema in February 2019. As a producer he has been Oscar-nominated for The Crying Game (1992), and has also produced multi-Academy Award nominated films including Mona Lisa (1986), Little Voice (1998), Michael Collins (1996), The End of the Affair (1999), Interview with a Vampire (1994), and Carol (2016). He currently runs the production company Number 9 Films with his partner Elizabeth Karlsen.
The Just William series is a sequence of thirty-eight books written by English author Richmal Crompton. The books chronicle the adventures of the unruly schoolboy William Brown.
Walter Wagner was the notary who married Adolf Hitler to Eva Braun in the Führerbunker on 29 April 1945.
The Constant Nymph is a 1928 British silent film drama, directed by Adrian Brunel and starring Ivor Novello and Mabel Poulton. This was the first film adaptation of the 1924 best-selling and controversial novel The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy and the 1926 stage play version written by Kennedy and Basil Dean. The theme of adolescent sexuality reportedly discomfited the British film censors, until they were reassured that lead actress Poulton was in fact in her 20s.
The Wolves in the Walls is a book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, published in 2003, in the United States by HarperCollins, and in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury. The book was highly praised on release, winning three awards for that year. In 2006, it was made into a musical which toured the UK and visited the US in 2007.
Peter the Pirate, also known in English as The Sea Wolves, is a 1925 German silent historical adventure film directed by Arthur Robison and starring Paul Richter, Aud Egede-Nissen, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. It was based on a novel by Wilhelm Hegeler. Leni Riefenstahl was offered the role of female lead by producer Erich Pommer, but after doing a screen test she eventually turned it down.
Gary Norman Arthur Botting is a Canadian legal scholar and criminal defense lawyer as well as a poet, playwright, novelist, and critic of literature and religion, in particular Jehovah's Witnesses. The author of 40 published books, he is one of the country's leading authorities on extradition law. He is said to have had "more experience in battling the extradition system than any other Canadian lawyer."
Ludwig Blattner was a German-born inventor, film producer, director and studio owner in the United Kingdom, and developer of one of the earliest magnetic sound recording devices.
Her Private Hell is a 1968 British sexploitation film. It is the feature film directorial debut of Norman J. Warren and the first of two films that he made for Bachoo Sen and Richard Schulman, founders of production company Piccadilly Pictures. It has been described as "Britain's first narrative sex film".
Elstree Studios on Shenley Road, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire is a British film and television production centre operated by Elstree Film Studios Limited. One of several facilities historically referred to as Elstree Studios, the Shenley Road studios originally opened in 1925.
