Life and Career
Shanley was born in The Bronx, New York City, to a telephone operator mother and a meat-packer father. Per his Editorial Review by Amazon, he was thrown out of St. Helene's kindergarten, banned from St. Anthony's hot lunch program and expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. When asked why he had been treated in this way, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went into the United States Marines.
He is a graduate of New York University, and is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre. For his script for the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Shanley won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
In 1990, Shanley directed his script of Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley also wrote two songs for the movie: "Marooned Without You" and "The Cowboy Song."
In 2002 Shanley was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame.
In 2005, Shanley's play Doubt: A Parable was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Desk Award and Tony Award for Best Play. Doubt: A Parable, is featured in The Fourth Wall, a book of photographs by Amy Arbus in which Shanley also wrote the foreword.
In 2008, Shanley directed a film version of Doubt starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams and Viola Davis. Today, Shanley resides in New York.
Read more about this topic: John Patrick Shanley
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
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sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.”
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“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
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