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Stephen Trombley | |
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| Born | December 8, 1954 Star Lake, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Author, filmmaker, musician |
| Website | www.stephentrombleyproductions.com |
Stephen Trombley (born December 8, 1954) is an American author, filmmaker and musician. He took British citizenship in 2003 and is a dual national. He is president of the independent film and television production company Worldview Pictures.
Stephen Marshall Trombley was born in Star Lake, New York in 1954. He was raised in Ballston Spa, NY and graduated from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 1975 with a BA in English. He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Nottingham and returned there in 1975 to begin work on a PhD with Roger Poole. His thesis Virginia Woolf and her doctors [1] was published in 1981 as 'All That Summer She Was Mad': Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors. [2] He was tutor in English at Nottingham before moving to London in 1977, where he co-founded the literary review Books & Issues with Aidan Coen. He was deputy editor of the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal from 1980-1985 and launched the quarterly journal Architectural Education (now incorporated in RIBA Transactions). In 1985 he joined John Slater and David Starkey as a director of the independent television production company Mirageland.
At Mirageland Trombley produced The Prince of Wales' ITV television special on community architecture, The Pride Factor. In addition to producing several documentaries at Mirageland, he also devised and wrote the young people's ITV network series Professor Lobster, and two seasons of Erasmus Microman. Naomie Harris, whom he cast in Erasmus Microman, went on to play Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Trombley's first international effort as a director was Caffe Lena, a film celebrating the life and coffeehouse of Lena Spencer who died in 1989. The film was broadcast on the BBC and as a PBS special. It starred Spalding Gray, Arlo Guthrie, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, David Bromberg, Utah Phillips, Rosalie Sorrels, Dave van Ronk, Rory Block, and David Amram.
In 1989 Trombley founded Worldview Pictures Ltd., an independent film and television production company in London. With Bruce Eadie as producer and co-writer, and Peter Miller as film editor, Trombley directed many documentary films of note including The Execution Protocol (1992), of which Vincent Canby of The New York Times said it "is not easy to sit through, but it touches nerves that force a rethinking of essential values. It is exceptionally well done." The Execution Protocol was the first of a trilogy that followed the story of condemned Missouri inmate A. J. Bannister, tracing his childhood, fall into crime, his conviction for a murder he claimed was self-defense, and his execution in 1997. The other films in the series are Raising Hell: The Life of A. J. Bannister (1995) and a death in the family (1999). Another trilogy explored aspects of the Holocaust, including its roots in eugenics. The Lynchburg Story (1993) looked at the sterilization of 8,000 young people in Virginia state institution. Drancy: A Concentration Camp in Paris 1941-1944 (1994) explored the mechanisms of French collaboration in the Holocaust; Le Monde wrote "the striking clarity of tone and hard-hitting evidence are blood chilling." Nuremberg (1996) told the story of the creation of the military tribunal that tried the Nazi war criminals. It won an Emmy Award in 1997 for Outstanding Historical Programming. In 1997 Worldview produced the eight-part television series War & Civilization based on the lifetime's work of military historian John Keegan, and narrated by Walter Cronkite. The New York Times called it "one of the most ambitious documentaries of recent years". In 1997 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston honored Trombley with a month-long retrospective of five films, 'An Eye For Justice: Films by Stephen Trombley'. He then worked behind the fence at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and on location at Arzamas-16, the secret Russian nuclear weapons center, to make the 2000 documentary Stockpile: The New Nuclear Menace, narrated by Martin Sheen. In 2003 Worldview Pictures moved to New York, becoming Worldview Pictures Corp. In 2010 he released Spitzer Uncut, a two-hour interview with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.
Trombley's first book was 'All That Summer She Was Mad': Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors (1981). It examined the work of eminent physicians who treated her and thought she was mad, contrasting their view with evidence from Woolf's fiction, letters, and diaries suggesting that what the doctors regarded as mad was her very self. While working as deputy editor of the RIBA Journal he edited, with Peter Murray, the guidebook Modern British Architecture since 1945 (1984). In 1988 Trombley published The Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterlization. In 1988 he also published the second edition of the Fontana Dictionary of Modern thought which he edited with Alan Bullock; a third, wholly revised edition appeared in 1999. The Guardian newspaper said that "For more than 20 years this book has been a bible for those struggling to remember the meaning of everything from Marxism to the Mormons." In 1989 Trombley published Sir Frederick Treves: The Extraordinary Edwardian (1989), and in 1992, The Execution Protocol: Inside America's Execution Industry. In 2012 Atlantic Books published Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World, and A Short History of Western Thought.
Trombley worked as a singer/songwriter throughout the 1970s, but music took a back seat during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2006 he founded the rock band Psychoneedles with Chris Sauer. The band played regularly in upstate New York and N ew York City for two years. They released an eponymous CD in 2007 with songs written by Trombley and Sauer. In 2008 Trombley and Jay Kerr cowrote the musical entertainment "Adirondack Awakening", to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's and Samuel de Champlain's exploration of that region. It was funded by the NYS Council on the Arts and premiered at the Fort Salem Theater in Salem, New York. In 2012, Trombley moved to Nashville, Tennessee after co-writing severals songs with Angela Kaset, whom he met while she was staying in Vermont in 2011. Upon moving to Nashville he became a regular co-writer with Fred Koller, with whom he penned three of the tracks on his 2014 CD, Tea For Three. These include "Suzy Says", "Whaddya Know" and "I Know It's Summer". The title track, "Tea For Three", was written with Oliver Ray, formerly of Patti Smith's band. "One of These Days" and "Man Of The World" were written with Kaset. In 2013, Trombley and Koller composed the musical 1961, which looks at peace and prosperity in the fictional town of Pleasantville, US, in the years between the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In 2016, he moved to Brossac in southwestern France. In 2017 he suffered a series of heart attacks and strokes and was hospitalized in Angoulême. His right arm was paralyzed and he developed ataxia. He lost his physical and intellectual ability to write. He spent eight weeks in a stroke rehabilitation centre. He recounted the story of his stroke and its mental and physical effects in his memoir At a Stroke: Diary of a Recovery. His experience of stroke also informs his forthcoming trilogy of novels introducing Detective Inspector Bernard Rousseau. The novels are set in Paris during World War II.
In 2013, Trombley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee first staged in October 1962. It examines the complexities of the marriage of middle-aged couple Martha and George. Late one evening, after a university faculty party, they receive unwitting younger couple Nick and Honey as guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship.
The mad scientist is a stock character of a scientist who is perceived as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" or "insane" owing to a combination of unusual or unsettling personality traits and the unabashedly ambitious, taboo or hubristic nature of their experiments. As a motif in fiction, the mad scientist may be villainous or antagonistic, benign, or neutral; may be insane, eccentric, or clumsy; and often works with fictional technology or fails to recognise or value common human objections to attempting to play God. Some may have benevolent intentions, even if their actions are dangerous or questionable, which can make them accidental antagonists.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Leonard Sidney Woolf was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children.
Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
Henry Woolf was a British actor, theatre director, and teacher of acting, drama and theatre who lived in Canada. He was a longtime friend and collaborator of 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, having stimulated Pinter to write his first play, The Room (1957), in 1956. Woolf served as a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan from 1983 to 1997 and as artistic director of Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan from 1991 until 2001.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women's colleges at the University of Cambridge.
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
Orlando is a 1992 period fantasy drama film loosely based on Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, Billy Zane as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I. It was written and directed by Sally Potter, who also co-wrote the score with David Motion. The film is an international co-production of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia.
Herbert David Ross was an American actor, choreographer, director and producer who worked predominantly in theater and film. He was nominated for two Academy Awards and a Tony Award.
Ernst Sigmund Goldner, known professionally as Ernest Gold, was an Austrian-born American composer. He is most noted for his work on the film Exodus produced in 1960.
The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes within different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name.
Sir George Henry Savage was a prominent English psychiatrist.
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1966 American drama film directed by Mike Nichols in his directorial debut. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman is an adaptation of Edward Albee's 1962 play of the same name. It stars Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, Richard Burton as George, George Segal as Nick, and Sandy Dennis as Honey. The film depicts a late-night gathering at the home of a college professor and his wife.
Worldview Pictures is an independent film and television production founded in 1989. Its work includes single documentary films such as the Emmy Award winning Nuremberg and the eight-part television series War & Civilization narrated by Walter Cronkite. In 2010 the company's production slate expanded to include science and lifestyle factual entertainment.
Julia Prinsep Stephen was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
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