Nineteen-eighty four
Michael Radford (1984)/ George Orwell (1949)
Presentation of the novelist
George Orwell is the pen-name of the novelist Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in 1903 in India and died in 1950. He is famous for his novels, mainly 1984 and Animal farm, but also worked as a journalist, essayist and critic. His literary work mostly deals with social injustice and opposition to totalitarianism.
Orwell described his family as “lower-upper-middle class”. He was sent to a public school, although the fees were really expensive his family managed to get a scholarship, and then another one to attend Eton. He then worked as an imperial policeman in Burma, and afterwards he went back to London where he dressed like a tramp to explore the poorer parts of the town. He took part in the Civil War in Spain.
From 1932 on, Orwell was working as a either teacher or a bookseller.
Presentation of the filmmaker
Michael Radford is an English film director and screenwriter who was born in 1946 in New Delhi in India, he's the son of a British father and an Austrian mother. He began to work briefly as a teacher before becoming a documentary film-maker. He worked on projects for the BBC in the late 70’s, covering subjects such as Scottish islanders, the soprano Isobel Buchanan and the singer Van Morrison. In 1983, he directed his first feature film called Another Time, Another Place which related a love story between a local Scottish woman and an Italian war prisoner during WWII. His second film, Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted from Georges Orwell’s made him known worldwide. The film had the particularities to be filmed in the same time and place as the story in the book, and to be Richard Burton’s last film. After 1984, Radford kept adapting.
In the 2000s, he adapted the William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons, and also directed the thriller called Flawless, starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine.
His...