Sam Mendes won the Best Director Academy Award for American Beauty, which also won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball), and Best Cinematography (Conrad L. Hall) and was nominated for 3 more. Mr. Mendes also won the Directors Guild of America and Golden Globe Awards, among other honors, for his work on the film.
His other films as director are Road to Perdition, which also earned Mr. Hall an Academy Award, and which was nominated for 5 more Oscars; Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx; and Revolutionary Road, for which Kate Winslet won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress [Drama] and for which Mr. Mendes was again a Golden Globe Award nominee. The latter was also nominated for 3 Academy Awards.
As producer, Mr. Mendes' credits include Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro; and Marc Forster's The Kite Runner, based on Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel.
Noted for his work in the theatre, Mr. Mendes founded the Donmar Warehouse in London, running it from 1992-2002. During this decade, the Donmar's productions included Assassins, Translations, Cabaret, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Glass Menagerie, Company, Habeas Corpus, The Front Page, The Blue Room, To the Green Fields Beyond, Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night. The latter staging transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2004. He has also produced – in tandem with his associate Caro Newling – over 60 plays, many of which have transferred to New York, including Electra, True West, Juno and the Paycock, and the Tony Award-winning revival of The Real Thing. Also on Broadway, through his Neal Street Productions, he most recently produced Shrek the Musical, and last directed Gypsy with Bernadette Peters; most recently, Mr. Mendes directed The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale, in repertory at both BAM and London's Old Vic, as the inaugural shows of the Bridge Project. The latter is a three-year partnership between Neal Street, BAM, and the Old Vic that will stage pairs of classic plays in, and with actors from, both the U.S. and the U.K.
His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company includes stagings of Troilus and Cressida, The Alchemist, The Tempest, and Richard III. For The National Theatre, he has directed The Sea, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, The Birthday Party, and Othello.In London's West End, he has staged The Cherry Orchard, The Plough and the Stars, Kean, London Assurance, and Oliver! He has also directed the Broadway transfers of the Donmar's productions of Cabaret, which received four Tony Awards including Best Revival of Musical, and David Hare's The Blue Room, starring Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen.
In 2002, Mr. Mendes won the London Evening Standard Award for Best Director. He is a three-time winner and five-time nominee for the Olivier Award for Best Direction, as well as a three-time winner of the London Critics Awards.
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