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Mike Leigh was born in 1943 in Salford, Lancashire. He trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art between 1960 and 1962, before becoming an assistant stage manager at Leatherhead Repertory Theatre. He went on to study at the Camberwell College of Art, the London Film School and the Central School of Art and Design.
In 1965 he directed and designed the original production of David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs at the Unity Theatre. In the same year he became an associate director at the Midland Art Centre in Birmingham, where he devised and directed his first play, The Box Play. Between 1967 and 1968 he was assistant director with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. He made his first feature film BLEAK MOMENTS in 1971, based on a play he had devised and directed at the Open Space Theatre the previous year.
Despite the huge acclaim showered on BLEAK MOMENTS – with awards from the Chicago and Locarno Film Festivals – Leigh was not to make another film for 17 years. Leigh’s trademark genesis of his work – through a long and complex improvisational process before committing the work to the written page - proved especially daunting for film producers.
In the meantime Leigh produced a body of work for the theatre and television of extraordinary quality, working with some of the most inventive and talented actors in the country. For the theatre he has written and directed over twenty stage-plays including Wholesome Glory (1973), Babies Grow Old (1974), Abigail’s Party (1977), Ecstasy (1979), Goose-Pimples (1981), Smelling a Rat (1988), Greek Tragedy (1989-90), It’s A Great Big Shame (1993) and Two Thousand Years (2005). During this period, Leigh completed nine full-length television plays and a radio feature before finally getting the chance to return to his favourite medium, the cinema, to make HIGH HOPES in 1988. With the producer of HIGH HOPES, the late Simon Channing-Williams, Leigh formed the production company Thin Man Films in 1989. From then, Mike Leigh’s national and international reputation has exploded – with all his subsequent films winning awards throughout the world, culminating in multi-Oscar nominations for SECRETS AND LIES (1996). His most recent film is the masterly ANOTHER YEAR .
