Peter Greenaway is an art-house film director, artist and curator born on 5 April 1942 in Newport, Wales. His family had moved from London to Wales to escape the Blitz during the Second World War; once the war ended they returned to the London area, and Greenaway grew up mainly in England from early childhood. His Welsh connection is therefore a genuine one of birthplace rather than upbringing.
Greenaway trained as a painter and muralist at Walthamstow College of Art, where a fellow student was the musician Ian Dury. He made his first short film, Death of Sentiment, in London cemeteries, and in 1965 joined the Central Office of Information, where he worked for fifteen years as a film editor and director on documentary shorts. His breakthrough as a feature director came with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a stylised murder mystery set in the seventeenth century.
Further films followed through the 1980s, including A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987) and Drowning by Numbers (1988). His most commercially successful film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), brought him wider international attention. Greenaway’s work is known for its highly structured, painterly visual style, drawing on his training as an artist and on the influence of Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerist painting.
In 2014 Greenaway received the BAFTA Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award. He has continued to work as a filmmaker, curator and multimedia artist based between Amsterdam and London, staging exhibitions and installations alongside his film work.