Ben Lewin is an Australian-American film director and screenwriter.
Early Life[]
Ben Lewin was born in Poland and as a child, he emigrated with his family to Melbourne, Australia. At the age of six, he contracted polio which caused him to use crutches for the rest of his life. Lewin attended the University of Melbourne where he studied law. In 1971, he left his job as a barrister in Australia after being given a scholarship to study film at National Film and Television School in England. After school, Lewin remained in England to work in television.
Career[]
After graduating, he joined BBC Television as a director on the Nationwide program, followed by other documentary and current affairs programs for Thames, Granada and Channel Four Television. His breakthrough project as a writer/director was The Case of Cruelty to Prawns, a comedy-drama that won the Best Television Film Award at the prestigious Melbourne Film Festival.
Some of Ben's notable credits include the murder mystery feature Georgia, starring Judy Davis, which won eight Australian Film Institute nominations; the much-honored and multi-award winning The Dunera Boys starring Bob Hoskins - the true story of 2,000 English Jews who were mistakenly suspected as Nazi spies and transported to Australia in 1940; the award-winning Matter of Convenience, a tele-movie about marriages of convenience with Jean-Pierre Cassel; and Plead Guilty, Get a Bond, about a tribal aboriginal woman and her conflict with the Australian legal system.
Ben Lewin is best known in the US as the writer and director of comedy features; Paperback Romance, a love story about slightly damaged people starring Anthony LaPaglia and Gia Carrides, and the messianic farce The Favor, the Watch and the Very Big Fish, starring Bob Hoskins, Jeff Goldblum and Natasha Richardson. More recently, Ben Lewin brought his distinctive mix of the preposterous and the perceptive to Hollywood Gold, a personal documentary of his misadventures in the Beverly Hills jewelry trade at Oscar time. His episodic television work includes the season's highest-rated episode of Ally McBeal ("Let's Dance") and Touched By An Angel, as well as a number of episodes of the most popular drama series in Australia, Sea Change.
In 2011, Ben Lewin began production of the feature film The Sessions, starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt. Ben wrote and directed this moving true-life story, based on the sexual awakening of Mark O'Brien, a Berkeley-based poet and journalist who spent most of his life in an iron lung. Ben has been living and working in California since 1994 and is married to producer Judi Levine.
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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original article was at Ben Lewin. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with MOVIEPEDIA, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |