Kathryn Bigelow Biography
Who Is Kathryn Bigelow?
Kathryn Ann Bigelow popularly known as Kathryn Bigelow born is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Covering a wide range of genres, her films include Near Dark (1987), Point Break (1991), Strange Days (1995), K-19: The Widow maker (2002), The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Detroit (2017).
In 2022,she was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for Apple’s ”Hollywood In Your Pocket”.
With The Hurt Locker, Bigelow became the first woman to win any of the Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Director.
She also became the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director in 1995 for Strange Days.
Age
She was born on 27 November 1951 in San Carlos, California, United States. As of 2023, she is 71 years old and of American nationality.
Kathryn Bigelow Height
She is 1.82 meters tall.
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Husband
She was the wife of James Cameron but they split up in 1991. They got wedded in 1989.
Young Kathryn Bigelow
Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, the only child of Gertrude Kathryn (née Larson; 1917–1994), a librarian, and Ronald Elliot Bigelow (1915–1992), a paint factory manager.
Her mother was of Norwegian descent. She attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, CA.
Bigelow’s early creative endeavors were as a student of painting. She enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute in the fall of 1970 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in December 1972.
While enrolled at SFAI, she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York City. For a while, Bigelow lived as a starving artist, crashing with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci’s loft.
She had a minor role in Richard Serra’s video Prisoner’s Dilemma (1974). Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.
Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master’s degree.
Her professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer, and Susan Sontag, as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said, and she worked with the Art & Language collective and Lawrence Weiner.
She also taught at the California Institute of the Arts. While working with Art & Language, Bigelow began a short film, The Set-Up (1978), which found favor with director Miloš Forman, then teaching at Columbia University, and which Bigelow later submitted as part of her MFA at Columbia.
Kathryn Bigelow Director
Bigelow’s short The Set-Up is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film. The film portrays “two men fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over.”
Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film’s all-night shoot.
Her first full-length feature was The Loveless (1981), a biker film that she co-directed with Monty Montgomery and featured Willem Dafoe in his first starring role.
Next, she directed Near Dark (1987), which she co-scripted with Eric Red. With this film, she began her lifelong fascination with manipulating movie conventions and genre.
In the same year, she directed a music video for the New Order song “Touched by the Hand of God”; the video is a spoof of glam metal imagery.
Bigelow’s subsequent films, Blue Steel, Point Break, and Strange Days, merged her philosophically minded manipulation of pace with the market demands of mainstream film-making. In the process, Bigelow became recognizable as both a Hollywood brand and an auteur.
All three films rethink the conventions of action cinema while exploring gendered and racial politics.
Movies | Films
- The Loveless
- Near Dark
- Blue Steel
- Point Break
- Strange Days
- Undertow
- The Weight of Water
- K-19: The Widowmaker
- The Hurt Locker
- Zero Dark Thirty
- Detroit
Oscar | Awards | Academy Award
In 2010, she was the winner for best director and the best picture in the movie The Hurt Locker. She was also nominated for the best picture award in 2013 for the movie Zero Dark Thirty.
Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker
Following the death of their well-respected Staff Sergeant in Iraq, Sergeant JT Stanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge find their Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit saddled with a very different team leader.
Staff Sergeant William James is an inveterate risk-taker who seems to thrive on war, but there’s no denying his gift for defusing bombs.
Initial release: 10 October 2008 (Italy)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Box office: 49.2 million USD
Budget: 11 million USD
Awards: Academy Award for Best Picture,
Kathryn Bigelow Net Worth
She has an estimated net worth of $40 million as of 2023.
Kathryn Bigelow James Cameron | James Cameron Oscar
It was the night when the ex-wife finally had her revenge – and more than 80 years of Oscar history was overturned. Kathryn Bigelow was in a straight fight with her former husband for the two most prized Oscars – the best director and best picture awards.
The pair, who were married for two years from 1989, were sitting within feet of each other. And while Avatar director James Cameron may have had the Academy Awards pedigree – his last blockbuster Titanic picked up a record-equalling 11 awards in 1998 – it was Miss Bigelow who triumphed at the 82nd Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
She made history by becoming the first ever woman to be named best director. Her film The Hurt Locker managed to beat off Avatar for the best picture award.
That’s despite the Iraq war film being made for £7million – £150milllion less than Cameron’s effort.
Cameron 55
Nevertheless, Cameron, 55, took his defeats in good part – pretending to strangle Miss Bigelow before embracing her as the extent of her triumph became clear.
As she opened the envelope to announce the winner of the best director category, Barbra Streisand had declared: ‘It’s about time.’ When she received the award, Miss Bigelow said: ‘This really is, there’s no way to describe it, it’s the moment of a lifetime.’
She dedicated the award to ‘the people who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . may they come home safe’. She said: ‘First of all, I hope I’m the first of many.
But I’m ever grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female filmmakers and have them feel that the impossible is possible and never give up on your dream.’
Daily Mail
She told the Daily Mail that it seemed incomprehensible to her that it had taken 82 years for a woman to take the best director crown. ‘That barrier’s down now,’ she added.
In all, The Hurt Locker won six awards, compared with Avatar’s three. The drama about a U.S. bomb disposal unit in Iraq did not prove popular at the box office and has just gone to DVD in the UK.
But the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were certainly impressed by it – even after producer Nicholas Chartrier was last week banned from the ceremony for sending an email to voters asking them not to vote for Avatar.
As for Cameron, he had made a public statement that it would be fine for Bigelow to win best director. But he had said he felt Avatar should be given best picture to honor all his colleagues who worked on the ground-breaking sci-fi movie.
On an otherwise predictable night for the Oscars, the awards went to the favorites. Hollywood veteran Jeff Bridges, 60, won the best actor award for Crazy Heart.
Statuette
Raising his statuette to the heavens, he said: ‘I want to thank my mum and dad for turning me on to such a groovy profession. This is honoring them as much as it is me.’
In the film, he plays fallen country singer Bad Blake, a heavy drinker who has been long starved of success and is relegated to playing small bars.
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz took the prize for best supporting actor for his role as a ruthless Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds, while the American comedian and actress Mo’Nique triumphed as best supporting actress for her role in Precious.
The other major film award went to Sandra Bullock, who beat off Brits Carey Mulligan and Helen Mirren to take the best actress award for her portrayal of southern belle Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side. Miss Bullock, 45, was won of the night’s most popular winners.
She picked up her award for The Blind Side only 24 hours after she had personally accepted the alternative pre-Oscar Golden Raspberry award for worst actress for All About Steve.
But with the post Oscar parties in full swing in the early hours of yesterday, she had to get home – to take over from the babysitter. Afterwards, Miss Bigelow spoke further about becoming the first female director to win.
Strange Days Kathryn Bigelow
Former policeman Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has moved into a more lucrative trade: the illegal sale of virtual reality-like recordings that allow users to experience the emotions and past experiences of others.
While the bootlegs typically contain tawdry incidents, Nero is shocked when he receives one showing a murder. He enlists a friend, bodyguard Mace (Angela Bassett), to help find the killer — and the two soon stumble upon a vast conspiracy involving the police force Nero once worked for.
Initial release: 3 September 1995
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Budget: 42 million USD
Box office: 8 million USD
Screenplay: James Cameron, Jay Cocks
Point Break Kathryn Bigelow
After a string of bizarre bank robberies in Southern California, with the crooks donning masks of various former presidents, a federal agent, Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), infiltrates the suspected gang. But this is no ordinary group of robbers.
They’re surfers — led by the charismatic Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) — who are addicted to the rush of thievery. But when Utah falls in love with a female surfer, Tyler (Lori Petty), who is close to the gang, it complicates his sense of duty.
Initial release: 12 July 1991 (USA)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Box office: 83.5 million USD
Budget: 24 million USD
Screenplay: W. Peter Iliff
Production Company
This information will soon be updated.
Kathryn Bigelow Near Dark
Cowboy Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) meets gorgeous Mae (Jenny Wright) at a bar, and the two have an immediate attraction.
But when Mae turns out to be a vampire and bites Caleb on the neck, their relationship gets complicated. Wracked with a craving for human blood, Caleb is forced to leave his family and ride with Mae and her gang of vampires, including the evil Severen.
Along the way Caleb must decide between his new love of Mae and the love of his family.
Initial release: 8 January 1988 (United Kingdom)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Budget: 5 million USD
Cinematography: Adam Greenberg
Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red
Kathryn Bigelow Children
There is no provided information of her children. This information will soon be updated.
Kathryn Bigelow Dating | Kathryn Bigelow Boyfriend | Kathryn Bigelow Ex Husband
Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow, age 64, working with her ex-boyfriend Mark Boal on a new movie. Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow, aged 64, seems to be still single since her break up with boyfriend Mark Boal 3 years ago.
Kathryn Bigelow Contact
She likes keeping low profile hence here is no updated information of her contact details.
Kathryn Bigelow New Film
Her latest release is the Detroit.
Blue Steel Kathryn Bigelow
When rookie cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) kills a convenience store robber, she does not notice when psychopathic commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) takes the dead man’s gun.
With no weapon at the crime scene, the police hold Turner accountable for killing an unarmed man. Meanwhile, Hunt uses the stolen weapon to go on a killing spree.
Turner teams up with detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) to clear her name and catch the killer. An unexpected romance complicates matters.
Initial release: 16 March 1990 (USA)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Box office: 8.2 million USD
Cinematography: Amir Mokri
Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red
Kathryn Bigelow Website
She has no website yet.
Kathryn Bigelow Quotes
- Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before. Kathryn Bigelow
- If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. Kathryn Bigelow
- I’m drawn to filmmaking that can transport me. Film can immerse you, put you there. Kathryn Bigelow
- On the other hand, I believe there’s hope, because the breakdown and the repair are happening simultaneously. Kathryn Bigelow
- Something becomes personal when it deviates from the norm. Kathryn Bigelow
- I think violence in a cinematic context can be, if handled in a certain way, very seductive. Kathryn Bigelow
- There should be more women directing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. Kathryn Bigelow