Biography

Michael Radford was born on February 24, 1946 in New Delhi, British India [now India]. He is a director and writer, known for 1984 (1984), The Postman (1994) and The Merchant of Venice (2004). He is married to Emma Tweed. They have two children. He was previously married to Iseult Teran.

[on his influences] The two real influences on cinema when I was growing up were the French New Wave and the Czech New Wave. I was fortunate to get to know and become friendly with Jiří Menzel, Ivan Passer and to a certain extent Miloš Forman. It was a great influence on me. There was a certain part of that world I wasn't so interested in, the sort of magical realism cinema. But I really loved Czech humor.

[on White Mischief (1987)] People liked it. It got caught up in the politics of Hollywood and ended up not being properly distributed and making any money. And it lost a lot of money for the backers, so I became persona non grata for a bit as a director does when a film loses money. And I found it very difficult. So I just went off, and I went to live in France for a bit, and I went to live in Italy, and I realised six years had past and I hadn't done anything! I'd made some money, so was okay financially, but I hadn't done anything and nobody was asking me to. Expect this Italian actor [Massimo Troisi]who would ring me up every three or four months and say come and make a film in Italy, we've got money and everything! And I thought I can't make a film in Italy. And then I suddenly started listening to what he was saying! We've got money! We can do this. We can actually make the picture. So I thought well, he's the only person who was asking me, so why not?