About Mark Cousins (filmmaker)
Mark Nathaniel Cousins (born 3 May 1965) is a Northern Irish director and writer. A prolific documentarian, among his best-known works is the 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. == Early life and education == Born in Coventry, England, Cousins was raised in Northern Ireland, moving with his family from Belfast to Ardglass and then to Antrim, while attending St Louis Grammar School in nearby Ballymena. This background is still reflected in his distinctive, lilting Northern Irish accent, which he has said people often recognize before they recognize his face. The twin son of a mixed Catholic–Protestant marriage, he has described his upbringing as marked by class awareness and the tensions of The Troubles, recalling having to stay overnight at school during the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike “in case those bad people got us.” Cousins has reflected that the timidity he connected with his Northern Irish, working-class upbringing made it hard to consider calling himself a creative person, but that he eventually shed that constraint and grew much freer in claiming a creative identity. At the same time, he has also spoken about how traces of class awareness have stayed with him, describing how certain spaces can still feel marked by middle-class norms. His class position and being “a skinny little arty-brainy boy” marked him as a target for bullies, a common experience in the hierarchical environment of the time. The bullying stopped when he was 16, after one of the most popular boys in school told others to leave him alone. Cousins has said that he had stopped believing in God by the time he did his A-levels in 1983. His art teacher, Heather McKelvey, introduced him to modernism and creative expression in a way that offered him “something else to believe in,” opening “a little door in my head which has never closed” and giving him the confidence to see creativity as a lifelong pursuit.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.