Life
Theo van Gogh was born in The Hague, Netherlands. His father, Johan van Gogh, was a member of the Dutch secret service ('AIVD', then called 'BVD'). Theo's uncle, also named Theo, was executed by the Germans as a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. Theo's great-grandfather was the art dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of the world-renowned artist Vincent van Gogh.
After dropping out of law school at the University of Amsterdam, Van Gogh became a stage manager. His self-proclaimed passion was film-making, and he debuted as a director with the movie Luger (1981). He was awarded a Gouden Kalf for Blind Date (1996) and In het belang van de staat ("In the Interest of the State") (1997). For the latter, he also received a "Certificate of Merit" from the San Francisco International Film Festival. As an actor he appeared in the production De noorderlingen ("The Northerners", 1992).
After that, he worked for television. Van Gogh also wrote provocative columns for Metro and other newspapers. He wrote polemic prose. His website was called De Gezonde Roker ("The Healthy Smoker"). The site's name, which is also the title of one of his books, was an allusion both to his notorious chain smoking and to the "politically correct" negative stance towards smoking in society.
His last book (2003) was Allah weet het beter (Allah Knows Better), in which he strongly condemned Islam. He was a well-known critic of Islam, particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He supported the nomination of the liberal (former PvdA Labour Party), Somalian-born female politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali for Dutch parliament.
Read more about this topic: Theo Van Gogh (film Director)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“we two
With life forever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity—”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)