Biography

Whilst giving a guest lecture at Lincoln University, England, he accidentally activated the electronic stage curtain. This occurred when he mentioned light bulb inventor Thomas A. Edison. After researching Edison in his youth, Puttnam grew to dislike the man and suggested that the movement of the curtain was the ghost of Edison playing a trick on him.

His biography was published in 1989, titled "Fast Fade" (by Andrew Yule), and chronicles his rise to the head of Columbia Pictures and his subsequent fall.

He was chancellor of the University of Sunderland for many years.

He has resided in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland, with wife Patsy since 1990.

He is the Chancellor of the Open University, the largest distance learning institution in the world.

I'm not afraid to fail, providing I fail honorably. The only thing I don't want is to end up being an irrelevant 70-year-old egomaniac.

Nothing good will happen while there are still cinemas that are shit heaps and critics who only like popular films when they are thirty years old. [1975]

While our technical ability to communicate grows at an exponential rate, there seems to be no corresponding increase in our ability to understand each other.

The artist is a credulous animal. He is often a dreamer. And if he finds someone who appears to share his dream, or, even better, someone with the means to realize that dream, then that artist tends to believe in Santa Claus.

The last really great film about life was probably Fanny and Alexander (1982). It's the last time I saw a film where you thought I'm watching a film here by somebody who really understands the complexity of life, who's really trying to help me navigate my own way through what's going to be a tough next thirty, forty years.