About Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway (born 5 April 1942) is a British filmmaker and visual artist. Greenaway's notable feature films include The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), Prospero's Books (1991), and Nightwatching (2007). He has also created works in other mediums, notably the multimedia Tulse Luper Suitcases, documentaries, and several video installations. In 2014, he received the BAFTA Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award. Greenaway's films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Mannerist painting in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. The BFI's Screenonline describes him as "a philosopher of cinema," and "an artist who is a believer in the subversive power of the image." Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years; he made his first film, Death of Sentiment, a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist Tom Phillips on a television serial A TV Dante, dramatising the first few cantos of Dante's Inferno. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.