Muriel Box is a Director, Scriptwriter and Producer British born on 22 september 1905
Muriel Box
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Muriel Box (22 September 1905 – 18 May 1991) was an oscar winning English screenwriter and director.
She was born Violette Muriel Baker in Tolworth, Surrey, England in 1905. When her attempts at acting and dancing proved to be unsuccessful, she accepted work as a continuity girl for British International Pictures. In 1935, she met and married journalist Sydney Box, with whom she collaborated on nearly forty plays with mainly female roles for amateur theatre groups. Their production company, Verity Films, first released short propaganda films, including The English Inn (1941), her first directing effort, after which it branched into fiction. The couple achieved their greatest joint success with The Seventh Veil (1945) for which they gained the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay in the following year.
After the war, the Rank Organisation hired her husband to head Gainsborough Pictures, where she was in charge of the scenario department, writing scripts for a number of light comedies, including two for child star Petula Clark, Easy Money and Here Come the Huggetts (both 1948). She occasionally assisted as a dialogue director, or re-shot scenes during post-production. Her extensive work on The Lost People (1949) gained her a credit as co-director, her first for a full-length feature.
In 1951, her husband created London Independent Producers, allowing Box more opportunities to direct. Many of her early films were adaptations of plays, and as such had a stage-bound feel, since she rarely shot on location. They were noteworthy more for their strong performances than they were for a distinctive directorial style. She favoured scripts with topical and frequently controversial themes, including Irish politics, teenage sex, abortion, illegitimacy, and syphilis, and several of her films were banned by local authorities.
She pursued her favorite subject - the female experience - in a number of films, including Street Corner (1953) about women police officers, Somerset Maugham's The Beachcomber (1954), with Glynis Johns as a resourceful missionary, and a series of comedies about the battle of the sexes, including The Passionate Stranger (1957), The Truth About Women (1958) and her final film, Rattle of a Simple Man (1964).
Box often experienced prejudice in a man-dominated industry, especially hurtful when perpetrated by another female. In 1950, Jean Simmons had her replaced on So Long at the Fair, and Kay Kendall unsuccessfully attempted to do the same with Simon and Laura (1955). Many producers questioned her competence to direct large-scale feature films, and while the press was quick to note her position as one of very few women directors in the British film industry, their tone tended to be condescending rather than filled with praise.
She left film-making to write novels and created a successful publishing house, Femina, which proved to be a rewarding outlet for her feminism. She divorced Sydney Box in 1969. The following year, she married Gerald Gardiner, who had been Lord Chancellor. She died in Hendon, London in 1991. Biography
Elle nait dans la banlieue de Londres, elle est le troisième enfant d'une famille modeste.Sa mère a des idées progressistes qui l'influencent. Elle se passionne pour l'écriture, le théâtre et le cinéma, et essaie vainement de devenir actrice professionnelle ou danseuse de ballet. Son mariage avec Sydney Box en 1935, lui-même scénariste, conduit Muriel vers l'écriture et la réalisation ː pendant la guerre, elle assiste son mari dans la direction de Verity Films , et réalise son premier film The English Inn (1941), court métrage de propagande. Elle écrit avec son mari le scénario de The Seventh Veil , le plus gros film britannique de 1945, et ils obtiennent l'Oscar du meilleur scénario original.
En 1950, Sydney fonde sa propre compagnie, London Independent Producers, ce qui donne à Muriel plus de possiblilité de diriger. Elle réalise d'abord des adaptations de pièces de théâtre ː The Happy Family 1952), To Dorothy a son (1954), Simon et Laura (1955)... Son travail se caractérise ensuite par son approche de sujets d'actualité : la situation politique en Irlande, l’avortement, la sexualité chez les adolescents…
Elle abandonne le cinéma après l'insuccès de Rattle of a Simple Man. Muriel et Sydney divorcent en 1969 .Elle continue à écrire des romans et fonde la première maison d'édition féministe de Grande-Bretagne et devient une militante pour les droits des femmes, travaillant avec son amie, Edith Summerskill, femme politique, pour réformer les lois britanniques sur le divorce. En 1970, elle a épousé Gerald Gardiner, Lord Chancelier.
Best films
(1945)
(Writer) Usually with