Peter Greenaway

Career overview

Peter Greenaway, CBE, is a Welsh writer-director, painter, and video artist born on April 5, 1942, in Newport, Gwent, Wales, United Kingdom. Raised in Chingford, Essex, he originally trained as a painter and muralist for three years before beginning his career in film. He made his first film, titled Death of Sentiment, which was a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries.

In 1965, he joined the Central Office of Information, where he worked for fifteen years as a film editor and director. Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s, while working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information, he produced several experimental documentary and mockumentary short films. This early period in his career culminated with the release of The Falls in 1980, a three-hour mockumentary that indexes the strange effects of the Violent Unknown Event on ninety-two people whose names begin with the letters F-A-L-L.

Following his early experimental work, he made his dramatic feature film debut with The Draughtsman's Contract in 1982. Throughout the 1980s, he directed a string of critically acclaimed and frequently controversial films, including A Zed & Two Noughts. Based in Amsterdam, Greenaway has amassed numerous known credits in directing over the course of his career.