Charles Sturridge - Career

Career

Sturridge began his career as an actor. In 1968 he played Markland in Lindsay Anderson's film if.... and portrayed the young Edward VII in Edward the Seventh. Directing episodes of Coronation Street, Strangers, World in Action, Crown Court and The Spoils of War by his late twenties, he gained international recognition for the eleven part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited which won over 17 awards including 2 Golden Globes and 6 British Academy awards.

Since then he has directed such films as Runners, A Handful of Dust, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Fairy Tale: A True Story, based on the Cottingley Fairies story which won the BAFTA for Best Children's film 1998. In 2009 he wrote and directed a remake of Eric Knight's children's classic Lassie. He also direct the black-and-white segment "La Forza del Destino" from Aria.

Other television work includes Soft Targets(1982), A Foreign Field (1985) and Gulliver’s Travels (1996), which won 6 Emmy’s including Best Series and the Royal Television Society’s Team award.

In 2001 he wrote and directed Longitude, based on Dava Sobell's best selling life of the clockmaker John Harrison which won the BANFF TV Festival Best Series award, two PAWS awards and five BAFTA’s. In 2000 he formed Firstsight Films whose first production was an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition which Sturridge wrote and directed. The film Shackleton (2002) starred Kenneth Branagh and was shot on location in the Arctic winning the BAFTA for Best Series and Best Costume, and the Radio Times Audience award for ‘Best Drama 2002’, it was also nominated for 7 Primetime Emmys, winning for music and photography.

Sturridge also contributed to Beckett on Film, part of a collaborative effort to film all of Samuel Beckett's plays with Anthony Minghella, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and Neil Jordan and Patricia Rozema. Following Minghella's death in 2009, Sturridge became a director for his final project, the television series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency starring Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose.

In 2010 he returned to Manchester and Coronation Street to direct the story of the making of its first episode The Road to Coronation Street it won both the RTS and BAFTA awards for Best Single Drama 2011 and a Gold Medal at the New York Film and TV Festival in Las Vegas.

In 2011, Sturridge directed a seven-minute short film, "Astonish Me", written by Stephen Poliakoff to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund. The film was shown in Odeon Cinemas in August 2011 and made available on the WWF website and YouTube.

His first professional theatre production was a musical version of Charles Dicken’s Hard Times which he co-wrote and directed at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry, since then occasional theatre work includes in 1985 The Seagull (also co-translator) with Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson and Jonathan Pryce and Samuel Beckett's Endgame (2006) with Kenneth Cranham and Peter Dinklage which opened at the Gate Theatre, Dublin on Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday and later transferred to the Barbican. He has also directed Handel’s Tolomeo (1998) for Broomhill Opera.

In 2006 Sturridge was one of a number of film and television directors who met at the Century Club to discuss their rights and representation and who subsequently became known as the 'Century Group'. As a result of this meeting in 2007 Sturridge and other members of the group joined the board of the "Directors & Producers Rights Society" which in 2008 widened its responsibilities and changed its name to Directors UK. The DUK currently has over 4000 members and represents the creative and economic rights of UK Film and Television directors with Paul Greengrass as President and Sturridge as the elected Chair.