Atom Egoyan - Life and Career

Life and Career

Egoyan was born Atom Yeghoyan in Cairo, Egypt, the son of Shushan (née Devletian) and Joseph Yeghoyan, artists who operated a furniture store. His parents were Armenian-Egyptians, and he was named Atom to mark the completion of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. In 1962, however, his parents left Egypt for Canada, where they settled in Victoria, British Columbia, and changed their last name to Egoyan. Atom and his sister, Eve, now a concert pianist based in Toronto, were raised by their parents in British Columbia.

As a boy, Atom's desire for assimilation into Canadian society and his struggle with his father led him to reject his family's Armenian culture. However, years later, when he attended the University of Toronto, he began to study Armenian history.

As a teenager, he became interested in reading and writing plays. Significant influences included Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Egoyan also attributes his future in the film industry to the film Persona, which he viewed at age fourteen, according to an interview he had with journalist Robert K. Elder for The Film That Changed My Life.

It gave me an incredible respect for the medium and its possibilities. To me, Persona marries a pure form and a very profound vision with absolute conviction. It’s very inspiring. I felt that it was able to open a door that wasn’t there before.

He graduated from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. It was at Trinity College that Egoyan came into contact with Harold Nahabedian, the Armenian-Canadian Anglican Chaplain of Trinity College. In interviews Egoyan credited Nahabedian for introducing him to the language and history of his ethnic heritage.

Egoyan is now based in Toronto, where he lives with his wife Arsinée Khanjian, a trilingual (English, French and Armenian) Armenian-Canadian actress who appears in many of Egoyan's films, and their son, Arshile (named after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky), who attends the Toronto French School. In 1999, Atom Egoyan was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Egoyan has directed a dozen full-length films, several television episodes, and a few shorter pieces. His early work was based on his own material. In 1984, his debut film "Next of Kin" worldpremiered at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg and won a major prize. He received some notice for the film Exotica (1994), but it was Egoyan's first attempt at adapted material that resulted in his best-known work, The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which earned him universal critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

He also directed Sarabande featuring Khanjian, Lori Singer, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma's performance of Bach's Fourth Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, as part of the latter's Inspired by Bach film series for Sony Classical.

The film Ararat (2002) generated much publicity for Egoyan. After Henri Verneuil's French-language film Mayrig (1991), it was the first major motion picture to deal directly with the Armenian Genocide. Ararat later won the Best Picture prize at the Genie Awards.

In 2004 Egoyan opened Camera Bar, a 50-seat cinema-lounge on Queen Street West in Toronto.

In 2005 Atom Egoyan joined the faculty of the media and communications division at European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he conducts intensive summer seminars. Beginning in September 2006, Egoyan taught at the University of Toronto for three years. He joined the faculty of arts and science as the dean's distinguished visitor in theatre, film, music and visual studies.

In 2006, he received the Master of Cinema Award of the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.

Later, he directed the erotic thriller Chloe (2009), theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. This film grossed $3 million in the United States theatrically and became one of the higher-grossing specialty films in the United States in 2010(according to Variety, "$3 million is the new $10 million" for specialty films' box office in 2010). Several months after the DVD/Blu-ray release of Chloe, Atom Egoyan said that Chloe had made more money than any of his previous films. The success of Chloe led Egoyan to receive many scripts of erotic thrillers.

Egoyan has won four awards each at the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. He is due to present at the 2012 TARA Awards in early April.