Biography

Bruce Robinson

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Overview

Born
May 2, 1946 · London, England, UK
Height
5′ 7″ (1.70 m)

Biography

Such is the mythology that has sprung up around Bruce Robinson's first film, the openly autobiographical Withnail and I (1987), that it's often hard to separate fact from fiction. But the facts appear to be these: trained as an actor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, he got off to a good early start when he was given a reasonably prominent part as Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). But despite this and other parts for the likes of Ken Russell (The Music Lovers (1971)) and François Truffaut (the male lead in The Story of Adele H (1975)), he found that acting mostly involved fruitless waiting for the phone to ring interspersed with the occasional TV commercial, while desperately trying to make ends meet. So he began writing screenplays in the mid-1970s, and was lucky enough to secure the patronage of producer David Puttnam who finally produced Robinson's script about Cambodia, The Killing Fields (1984) for which he was nominated for an Oscar. But cult success was to come a couple of years later when he wrote and directed Withnail and I (1987), a film about the squalid lives of two unemployed actors that was elevated to iconic status by students all over the world and which shot newcomer Richard E. Grant to stardom. Robinson's subsequent films, the advertising satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) and the serial-killer thriller Jennifer 8 (1992), while less memorable than his debut, both show that Robinson has more than enough intelligence and brio to make his future career worth following.
- IMDb mini biography by: Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

Family

Spouse

Trivia

His father was a Lithuanian Jew.
Retrospective at the 25th Oldenburg International Film Festival in 2018.
Bruce and his wife, Sophie, have two children - Lily (born 1987) and Willoughby (born 1994).
In 1999, he complained that all of his films, apart from Withnail & I, had been butchered, thus losing their true meaning.

Quotes

There are two types of animals roaming the Hollywood jungle. Those who do the screwing, those who get screwed. You have to try to ensure you're one of the former.
I was at some crummy party somewhere, and here's my agent talking, and he says, "So, what do you do?" I said, "You're my agent!" I'll never forget him saying that.
[on the era of Margaret Thatcher] The whole period outraged me. Things like the nation's 'jubilation' that she had committed an international war crime, sinking the Belgrano. Naturally, she would support Pinochet, a mass-murderer, because, in effect, she did the same thing and lied about it. The boat was not going in the direction she said it was, it was going in the opposite direction, and it was full of sea cadets, boys. She murdered 250 young men to get herself a war. Before the election, she was absolutely loathed, so she did what they all do: rush out and kill a few foreigners.
That five, six months with Zeffirelli completely destroyed me as an actor, the desire to do it and the ability to do it. He made me terrified of directors, because he was the first professional director I'd ever had and he treated me like shit.
[on Richard E. Grant]: Richard's a vicious old tart, and he obviously he had the wherewithal to play Withnail, otherwise he wouldn't have done it like he did. Withnail's quite a nasty guy, in many ways. He's a thief, a coward and - the ultimate treachery - he's prepared to sacrifice his friend to get what he wants. Withnail was a time-bomb ticking in Richard for many years, I think. Withnail was the detonator to allow that side of his personality to come out, and he's fundamentally changed.