Maurice Evans

Maurice Evans born 3 June 1901 (d. 1989)

Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor who became a US citizen in 1941.

Maurice Evans was born in Dorchester, Dorset. He first appeared on the stage in 1926 and joined the Old Vic Company in 1934, playing Hamlet, Richard II and Iago. His first appearance on Broadway was in Romeo and Juliet opposite Katharine Cornell in 1936, but he made his biggest impact in Shakespeare's Richard II, a production whose unexpected success was the surprise of the 1937 theatre season and allowed Evans to play Hamlet (1938) (the first time that the play was performed uncut on the New York stage), Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I (1939), Macbeth (1941), and Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1942) opposite the Viola of Helen Hayes, all under the direction of Margaret Webster.

When World War 2 arrived, he was in charge of an Army Entertainment Section in the Central Pacific and played his famous 'G.I. version' of Hamlet that cut the text of the play to make Prince Hamlet more decisive and appealing to the troops, an interpretation so popular that he took it to Broadway in 1945. He then shifted his attention to the works of Shaw, notably as John Tanner in Man and Superman and as King Magnus in The Apple Cart. He was also a successful Broadway producer of productions in which he did not appear, notably Teahouse of the August Moon.

American television audiences of the 1960s will remember Evans as Samantha's father, Maurice (the character was originally named Victor when he was introduced), on the sitcom Bewitched. He also played "The Puzzler" on Batman. Many viewers were unaware of Evans' extraordinary Shakespearean pedigree. His real-life insistence that his first name was pronounced the same as the name 'Morris' was ironically at odds with his Bewitched character's contrasting stance that it be pronounced 'Maw-REESE'.

As of 2006, Evans had appeared in more American television productions of Shakespeare than any other actor. In bringing Shakespeare to television, he was a true pioneer. Evans also brought his Shakespeare productions to Broadway many times, playing Hamlet in 4 separate productions for a grand total of 283 performances, a Broadway record that is not likely to be broken.

Evans had great impact onscreen as well, memorably in two 1968 films: as the evolved orang-utan, Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes and as Rosemary's friend Hutch in the thriller Rosemary's Baby.

In his later years, Evans returned to the English country of his birth and died of cancer in East Sussex, England, aged 87.

Henry Kendall

Henry Kendall born 28 May 1897 (d. 1962)

Henry Kendall was an English stage and film actor, theatre director and an immaculately stylish revue artiste.

Kendall was educated at the City of London School, and made his first appearance on the stage in September 1914 at the Lyceum Theatre. He had a distinguished war career, serving as a Captain in the Royal Air Force from 1916 to 1919, and on demobilisation was awarded the Air Force Cross.

He played the leading role of Reggie Ogden in the film The Shadow in 1933, and also starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 'bravest failure', Rich and Strange, US title East of Shanghai (1931).

Kendall dismissed his own cinematic work, although he appeared in a number of films in the 1930s and after. His appearances on the London stage were many however throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

As a gifted West End revue artiste he appeared in Charlot's Revue at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1924 and Charlot's Masquerade at the Cambridge Theatre in 1930. He also enjoyed great success co-starring with Hermione Gingold in the three long-running Sweet and Low revues; this was followed in June 1948 by the A la Carte revue at the Savoy Theatre.

But a greater contribution in this field was his appearance with Hermione Baddeley and Hermione Gingold ('The Two Hermiones'), Walter Crisham and Wilfred Hyde-White, in Leslie Julian Jones's revue Rise Above It, first at the Q Theatre in January 1941, when Hedley Briggs was nominally directing; then in two West End editions of the show which ran for a total of 380 performances at the Comedy Theatre opening in June 1941 and again in December 1941, when he was both starring and directing show.

As he reports in his autobiography: 'Of all forms of theatrical entertainment, revue is the most bitchy. The material is bitchy, the artists are bitchy and, strangely enough, the average revue audience is bitchy.'

In addition to a busy career as an actor and entertainer, he was frequently engaged as a director, notably staging the first productions of See How They Run (Peterborough Rep, tour and Q Theatre 1944; Comedy Theatre 1945), and The Shop at Sly Corner (St Martin's Theatre 1945).

He also directed numerous plays at the Embassy Theatre and Q Theatre.

Alec McCowen

Alec McCowen born 26 May 1925

Alec McCowen is an English actor, best known for classical roles including Shakespeare.

He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the son of Mary and Duncan McCowen. He was educated at the Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

McCowen made his film debut in 1953 in a British film, The Cruel Sea, but achieved his greatest successes on stage. He made his London debut at the Arts Theatre in Ivanov in 1950, and had rising success as Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge (1954), Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker (1954), and appearances at the Old Vic Theatre in 1959/60 in many Shakespearean plays, notably as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. His breakthrough came as Friar William Rolfe in Hadrian the Seventh, for which he won an Evening Standard Award for the London production and a Tony nomination after taking it to Broadway. His next big successes were in Molière's The Misanthrope opposite Diana Rigg (1973) and the role of psychiastrist Martin Dysart in the world premire of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973), but his greatest achievement was his one-man performance of the complete text of Saint Mark's Gospel (1978), for which he received worldwide acclaim and another Tony nomination.

McCowen has appeared in the films Never Say Never Again (as Q), Cry Freedom, Frenzy , The Age of Innocence, and Travels With My Aunt, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination. He notably appeared in the film based on the life of Cynthia Payne Personal Services (1987) with Julie Walters. He starred in the lead role of the 1980s TV series Mr Palfrey of Westminster.

His partner, the actor Geoffrey Burridge died in 1987 from an AIDS-related illness.

In 1989 he was selected to appear on the celebrity surprise show This Is Your Life but was aghast at the programme's complete failure to mention Geoffrey Burridge, who had died less than two years previously and McCowen - bravely for the time - insisted that his late partner be acknowledged.

Nicholas Hytner

Sir Nicholas Hytner born 7 May 1956

Sir Nicholas Hytner is an award-winning English producer and director.

Hytner was born in Manchester to a Jewish family, attended Manchester Grammar School and read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He worked as an Associate Director at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre between 1985 and 1989, and at the National Theatre in London between 1989 and 1997. His directional work includes The Country Wife, Edward II, Don Carlos, Ghetto, Miss Saigon, Orpheus Descending, a 2-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Alan Bennett's The History Boys, Carousel, Southwark Fair and The Alchemist.

He has also directed movies, such as The Crucible, The Madness of King George, The Object of My Affection and Centre Stage.

His direction of the world-wide hit Miss Saigon and the launching of his period as director of the National Theatre with the controversial Jerry Springer: the Opera both benefitted from his pathbreaking direction of operas, including most notably Xerxes in 1985, which won the Laurence Olivier Opera Award that year, became a huge hit (uniquely for a Handel opera in modern times) and is still in the English National Opera repertory. He has subsequently directed opera for Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Paris Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, Geneva Opera and Bavarian State Opera.

He was appointed director of the National Theatre in London in 2003. He has made some drastic changes at the National, choosing much more political and controversial pieces than his predecessors, but he was famously quoted upon being appointed the job that he himself was 'a member of all sorts of interesting minorities'. He also introduced a very successful plan called the Travelex £10 Season, which, as the name suggests, offers up a number of tickets at a very reduced price.

Hytner's film version of the very successful stage play The History Boys appeared in 2006.

Hytner was knighted in the 2010 New Years Honours List for services to drama.

Lindsay Anderson

Lindsay Anderson born 17 April 1923 (d. 1994)

Lindsay Gordon Anderson was a Scottish film critic, and a film, theatre and documentary director. The son of a British Army officer, he was born in Bangalore, South India, and educated at Cheltenham College and Wadham College, Oxford.

Before going into film-making, Anderson was a prominent film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine (1947-52), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz; later writing for the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. In one of his early and most well-known polemical pieces, Stand Up, Stand Up, he outlined his theories of what British cinema should become.

Anderson developed an acquaintance from 1950 with John Ford, which led to his writing what has come to be regarded as one of the standard books on that director, About John Ford (1983). As seen in his writings, another major influence was Humphrey Jennings, the great wartime documentary film maker.

Following a series of screenings which he organised at the National Film Theatre of independently-produced short films by himself, Karel Reisz and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late-1950s. This was the belief that the cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that the working classes ought to be seen on Britain's screens.

Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others he secured funding from a variety of sources and they each made a series of socially challenging short documentaries on a variety of subjects.

These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960s with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life, Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

One of Anderson's early short films, Thursday's Child, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. Anderson reconnected with his roots as a documentary maker in 1985 when he was invited by producer Martin Lewis to chronicle the first-ever visit to China by Western pop artists Wham! resulting in Anderson's film Foreign Skies: Wham! In China.

Anderson is best remembered internationally for his 'Mick Travis' trilogy of feature films, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as Travis: If...., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.

Anderson was also a significant British theatre director. He was long associated with London's Royal Court Theatre, where he was Co-Artistic Director 1969-70, and Associate Artistic Director 1971-75, directing premiere productions of plays by David Storey, among others.

Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation

Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett born 8 April in 1943 (d. 1987)

Michael Bennett was a Tony Award-winning American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer.

Born Michael Bennett DiFiglia to a Roman Catholic father and a Jewish mother in Buffalo, New York, he studied dance and choreography in his teens and staged a number of shows in his local high school before dropping out to accept the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story.

Bennett's career as a Broadway dancer began in the 1961 Betty Comden-Adolph Green-Jule Styne musical Subways Are For Sleeping, after which he appeared in Meredith Willson's Here's Love and the short-lived Bajour. In the mid-1960s he was a featured dancer on the NBC pop music series Hullabaloo, where he met fellow dancer Donna McKechnie.

Bennett made his choreographic debut with A Joyful Noise (1966), which lasted only twelve performances, and in 1967 followed it with another failure, Henry, Sweet Henry (based on a Peter Sellers film). Success finally arrived in 1968 in the form of Promises, Promises, an adaptation of the film The Apartment, with a hip contemporary score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. For the next few years, he earned praise for his work on Twigs with Sada Thompson, Coco with Katharine Hepburn, two Stephen Sondheim productions - Company and Follies (which he co-directed with Hal Prince) - and the Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields' hit Seesaw, for which he was also the director and librettist.

The process of taking over the troubled Seesaw on the road, just six months before it was scheduled to open, convinced Bennett the usual way of developing musicals - rehearsals, out-of-town tryouts, previews, and opening - was no longer efficient and devised a better plan. He decided to do a show about the lives of 'gypsies' - chorus boys and girls - but rather than commission a script or write one of his own he let the story-line evolve through a series of group therapy-style workshops in which fellow dancers shared their feelings and frustrations about their careers. Hundreds of hours of audio tapes eventually led to the creation of his biggest and most personally-felt triumph, A Chorus Line, which opened in July 1975 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. The reviews were ecstatic and the demand for tickets so huge it transferred uptown to the Shubert Theater, where it remained a sell-out hit for fifteen years. It won nine Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

As its creator, choreographer, and director, Bennett devoted the next several years of his life to the show, auditioning, rehearsing, and directing productions throughout the world. Realising it was very much a theatrical piece intended to be played on a proscenium stage, he declined an offer to direct the screen version, although he agreed to join the project as a creative consultant, a position he left early on due to differences with the studio (Bennett believed the movie should be about the audition process for the filming of the stage play, rather than a movie version of the play itself). Director Richard Attenborough declined to use Bennett's original choreography, instead opting to hire Jeffrey Hornaday, and the end result was a disappointing critical and commercial failure.

Although A Chorus Line was very much an ensemble piece, the original cast's standout star was Bennett's old friend McKechnie. The two married in 1976, but separated three months later and eventually divorced, but remained close friends. The bisexual Bennett's relationships with men, including an early one with fellow dancer Larry Fuller, were more discreet, less-publicised, and tended to be lengthy.

A Chorus Line was a tough act to follow. Bennett's next musical was the unsuccessful Ballroom, but he found himself at the top again in 1981 with Dreamgirls, with a book and lyrics by Tom Eyen and music by Henry Krieger.

In the early 1980s, Bennett worked on various projects, but none of them reached the stage. His addictions to alcohol and drugs, notably cocaine and quaaludes, severely affected his ability to work and impacted on many of his professional and personal relationships. In 1985, he abandoned the nearly-completed musical Scandal, which he had been developing for nearly five years through a series of workshop productions, and signed to direct the West End production of Chess, but he had to withdraw in January 1986 due to his increasingly failing health, leaving Trevor Nunn to complete the production using Bennett's already commissioned sets. He moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he remained until his death from AIDS-related lymphoma at the age of forty-four. He left a sizable portion of his estate to funding research to fight the epidemic.

Sean Mathias

Sean Mathias born 14 March 1956

Sean Gerard Mathias is a British theatre director, film director, writer and actor.

He was born in Swansea, south Wales. He is known for directing the film, Bent, and for directing highly acclaimed theatre productions in London, New York, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Sydney. He has also had a notable professional and personal partnership with the actor, Sir Ian McKellen.

Mathias began his career as an actor, making his first appearance on screen in an episode of the cult BBC TV series, Survivors, in 1977 in a small role. In the same year, he played an Irish Guards lieutenant in the film, A Bridge Too Far.

In 1978, Mathias appeared in a production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, during which time he met the actor, Ian McKellen, who subsequently became his partner of about nine years.

His acting career continued into the 1980s, with minor appearances on TV and in films. Although he made one notable appearance in the film, White Mischief, in 1988 as Gerald Portman, his greatest achievements have come in directing and writing.

Mathias's play, Cowardice, was produced at the Ambassadors Theatre in London in 1983, starring McKellen. Despite poor reviews, he was undeterred and followed it with Infidelities, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1985 before transferring to London's Donmar Warehouse. A Prayer For Wings, directed by Joan Plowright, was produced in Edinburgh in 1987 and, after winning a Fringe First awards, transferred to London. Later plays include Poor Nanny (1989), Swansea Boys (1990).

His writing also includes a novel, Manhattan Mourning, published in 1988, and the BBC TV film, The Lost Language of Cranes (1992).

Mathias' career as a theatre director took off in 1988 with Exceptions. The following year, he directed a revival of Bent, the award-winning play by Martin Sherman that had opened on Broadway in 1979 starring McKellen. Performed as a benefit, this performance featured McKellen, Richard E Grant, Ian Charleson and Ralph Fiennes. After receiving critical acclaim, Mathias directed a full run in 1990 with McKellen alongside Paul Rhys and Christopher Eccleston.

Buoyed by this success, Mathias went on to direct hit shows in both London and on Broadway, including Chekhov's Uncle Vanya with McKellen and Antony Sher, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (again with McKellen), and Noel and Gertie.

In 1994, Mathias won the London Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best Director for Noel Coward's Design for Living and Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles. This transferred to Broadway in 1995 as Indiscretions. It earned nine Tony Award nominations including Best Director of a Play.

Mathias directed his first Stephen Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music, at the National Theatre in 1995, with Judi Dench and Sian Phillips. He worked with Phillips again in 1997, directing her as Marlene Dietrich in Marlene, which transferred to Broadway two years later and gained two Tony Award nominations.

Other London directorial credits include Antony and Cleopatra and Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. His career moved across the Atlantic to New York, where, in 2001, he directed McKellen and Helen Mirren in Strindberg’s Dance of Death. He went on to direct this in London and Sydney in 2003. Also in 2001, he directed an off-Broadway production of Servicemen by Evan Smith. He followed this with a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man.

In 2002, he returned to Sondheim to direct Company at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater in Washington DC as part of its Sondheim Celebration, with a cast including John Barrowman and Lynn Redgrave.

Mathias gave into the lure of panto, and for Christmas 2004 he directed Aladdin at the Old Vic in London, with McKellen as Widow Twankey. Due to its huge success, Mathias reunited with McKellen for a second run the following Christmas.

Mathias has been based in South Africa since 1997 after visiting the country with the National Theatre in 1994 for a series of workshops. He has continued to direct occasional plays in London, the US and elsewhere.

Despite his focus on theatre direction, Mathias is also known as a film director because of his first - and currently only - feature film, Bent (1997), based on the play that propelled him to success.

In 2009 Mathias directed two very different, high-profile West End smash hits: a dream cast revival of Waiting for Godot starring Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart, and Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Anna Friel.

Tommy Tune

Tommy Tune born 28 February 1939

Tommy Tune is an award-winning American actor, dancer, singer, director, producer, and choreographer.

Born Thomas James Tune in Wichita Falls, Texas, he attended Lamar High School in Houston. In 1965, he made his Broadway debut as a performer in the musical Baker Street. His first Broadway directing and choreography credits were for the original production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1978.

Off-Broadway, Tune has directed The Club and Cloud Nine.

Tune's film credits include Hello, Dolly! and The Boy Friend.

Tune is the only individual to win Tony Awards in the same categories (Best Choreography and Best Direction of a Musical) in consecutive years (1990 and 1991), and the first to win in four different categories.

In 1997, Tune published Footnotes, a memoir. Despite the disjointed nature of the autobiography, Tune offers an insightful look into his then thirty-year career. It is here that he writes intimately about what drives him as a performer, choreographer and director. His obsession and desire to find everlasting love is prominent in the memoir, offering many personal stories about being openly gay and being hurt by other lovers. Ultimately though, it is his passion for theatre, dance, and people that carry him through a fruitful career full of many successful projects.

Two years later, he made his Las Vegas debut as the star of EFX at the MGM Grand Hotel.

In 2003, Tune was presented with the US's highest honour for artistic achievement, the National Medal of Arts.

The Tommy Tune Awards are awarded for outstanding work in high school theatre in Houston.

At 6'6½", Tune is unusually tall for a dancer. When not performing, he runs an art gallery in Tribeca that features his own work.

Ned Sherrin

Ned Sherrin born 18 February 1931 (d. 2007)

Edward George Sherrin, better known as Ned Sherrin, was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. But more than that he was he was a humorist, anecdotalist, raconteur, impresario, producer, presenter, playwright, and actor - a veritable renaissance man.

Sherrin was born in Somerset, a million miles away from the theatrical and broadcasting world he came to embody. His father ran a farm and Sherrin confessed he didn't like getting his hands dirty.

National Service took him away from the milking and his subsequent time at Oxford gave him his first real taste of the theatre, first in serious drama, later in revue. There, he discovered that his talent lay not so much in writing and performing as in producing. Nevertheless, after gaining a law degree, he trained as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1955. But any thought of a legal career was soon banished when an old friend he met in the street offered him a producer job at Associated Television.

In his autobiography, Sherrin wrote: 'In a long career of happy accidents, perhaps the most useful was to have been born in 1931 and to complete National Service, Oxford and bar exams precisely in time for the opening of commercial television.'

Commercial television gave him his break, but the BBC made Ned Sherrin's name. In 1957 he moved to the Corporation and directed the Tonight programme along with presenters Cliff Michelmore, Fyfe Robertson, Alan Whicker et al.

Then, in 1962 came That Was The Week That Was (TW3) which contained not only satire but also serious interviews, sketches and music too. Sherrin said the format came about as a way of combining 'the two things that I'd always enjoyed most - which were a lively interest in current affairs and a terrible fascination for vaudeville, musicals and old jokes'.

Hosted by a young David Frost, the show was to prove controversial in the way it poked fun at politicians not used to such irreverence. It became essential Saturday night viewing for some 12 million people.

Sherrin described the programme's brief at the time as 'aware, pointed, irreverent, fundamentally serious, intelligently witty, outspoken in the proper sense of the word'.

TW3 also launched the careers of writers and performers such as Dennis Potter, Willie Rushton, Kenneth Cope, Lance Percival and Millicent Martin.

The show was taken off after two years - it had proved too contentious, especially with an election approaching. But there were follow-up programmes in similar vein such as Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, and BBC3.

Sherrin then turned his attention to writing, producing and directing for the stage and screen, often in collaboration with the writer and critic, Caryl Brahms.

He produced several West End plays and musicals including I Gotta Shoe and The Mitford Girls. He also directed the highly successful Side By Side by Sondheim and Keith Waterhouse's Jeffrey Barnard is Unwell with Peter O'Toole in the title role. On screen, he directed The Virgin Soldiers, Up Pompeii and The National Health among others.

A great raconteur, Sherrin won the Benedictine 'After Dinner Speaker of the Year' award in 1991 and was made a CBE in 1997. He also compiled anthologies of theatrical anecdotes and humorous quotations.

Sherrin's great store of funny stories made him ideally suited to radio programmes such as BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends, which he presented between 1986 and December 2006, and music quiz Counterpoint.

Asked once about the worst aspect of his radio career, he said: 'I can't think of a bad thing about it. If I wasn't being paid for it I would be doing it as a hobby.'

For more than half a century, his urbane wit influenced so much of Britain's artistic life, in the theatre, on screen and on the air.

Openly gay, he was a patron of the London Gay Symphony Orchestra. He died of complications of throat cancer on 1 October 2007, aged 76.

BBC Obituary: Ned Sherrin

Matthew Bourne

Matthew Bourne born 13 January 1960

Matthew Bourne OBE is a choreographer.

Matthew was born in Walthamstow, London. At the age of five or six he staged his first production. In 1982 he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, where he was awarded a BA in Dance Theatre. For the next year (1985-1986) he danced with the Laban Centre's Transitions Dance Company. As a founder member of Lea Anderson's Featherstonehaughs he created many roles within the company. In addition to founding and choreographing for his own companies he has collaborated in theatre productions, working with actors including Sir Nigel Hawthorne, Dawn French and Jonathan Pryce (Oliver! in 1994). His final performance as a dancer was in January 1999 on Broadway. Since then he has been a director/choreographer.

Adventures in Motion Pictures, a dance company, was founded in 1987 by Matthew Bourne after he graduated from the Laban Centre in south London. Bourne's first professional stage production was Overlap Lovers. An Intrigue in Three Parts in 1987. Apart from a gap in 1993 he has choreographed musicals and ballets every year. His work was featured in the film Billy Elliot in 2000, showing the older Billy (played by Adam Cooper) starring in Bourne's production of Swan Lake. As a result, the Swan Lake sequence has probably been seen by more people than anything else he has done.

His first major brush with controversy was Swan Lake in 1995, where the story was entirely re-written and the role of the swans taken by men. The music by Tchaikovsky remained intact. This has been revived several time since then. It is not a gay ballet as such, but there is a homoerotic undercurrent. Some critics have reviewed the show harshly, saying the traditional plot has become absurd and that many scenes seem to lack motivation. Others have praised it lavishly. The ballet has been substantially revised for a new touring production in 2009/10. Similar criticism (and praise) greeted Nutcracker! in 2002.

Bourne has stated that his inspiration for most of his recent works are films and that Swan Lake was inspired in part by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

The Car Man (a version of Carmen with a homoerotic The Postman Always Rings Twice twist) was produced in 2000 and toured regularly since then.

Bourne directed and choregraphed a version of The Nutcracker for the Christmas season at London's Sadler's Wells theatre in 2002 and it subsequently toured the US. Bourne's take on the Nutcracker was unique because, in an homage to The Wizard of Oz, Bourne set the opening and ending in black and white and the world of the Nutcracker in colour. Bourne also kept it in Victorian times but set it in a Victorian orphanage resembling something out of Charles Dickens. He also made the characters quite a bit more grotesque, and introduced a more openly sexual element that not everyone has welcomed.

Bourne's latest dance company is called New Adventures.

Bourne directed and choreographed Play Without Words in 2002 and 2003. It was a work inspired by the film The Servant. In 2004 he was awarded an OBE and in February 2005 won an Olivier Award for his choreography in the stage production of Mary Poppins. He revamped his 1994 production of Highland Fling for a UK and Asian tour in 2005.

A book by the theatre critic Alastair Macaulay Matthew Bourne and His Adventures in Motion Pictures was published in 2000.

Bourne's next project, after a successful ballet version of the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands (2005-9), which toured the world extensively, was reported to be Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet with an all-male cast and a much stronger gay element, provisionally entitled Romeo, Romeo. In fact the next New Adventures production was Dorian Gray, a version of the Oscar Wilde novel, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in September 2008 before transferring to Sadler's Wells and touring the UK. This was followed by a sell-out UK and international tour of a revamped Swan Lake - a show that retains its power - and in 2010 by a completely revised production of Bourne's Cinderella.

Maurice Béjart

Maurice Béjart born 1 January 1927 (d. 2007)

Maurice Béjart was one of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who attracted huge audiences to ballet.

Maurice Béjart was born in Marseilles, the eldest of three children of the distinguished philosopher Gaston Berger and his wife, Germaine.

Because of his slight physique as a child a doctor recommended that the 11-year-old boy should take some form of exercise or sport. With two great interests in life, reading and the theatre, young Maurice thought dancing might be a good idea. And so it proved.

As soon as he could, he moved to Paris to study with such celebrated teachers as Leo Staats, Lubov Egorova, Nora Kiss and Madame Rousanne. Later, on the recommendation of Margot Fonteyn, he moved to London to study with Vera Volkova.

Having adopted the stage name Maurice Béjart – a homage to Molière's wife the actress Armande Béjart – he toured with several small companies. In 1949 he joined Mona Inglesby's International Ballet and danced a number of important roles, including the virtuoso Bluebird pas de deux in that company's Sleeping Beauty. The following year he joined the company of the Swedish choreographer Birgit Cullberg, where he had his first experience of modern dance. He also worked with the Royal Swedish Ballet for a time, which led to his first film choreography and his first Stravinsky ballet, The Firebird (1952).

Although he had been choreographing since an early age it was not until 1953, after a break caused by ill-health and obligatory military service, that Béjart formed his own small company in association with the actor and writer Jean Laurent, based at the Théâtre de l'Etoile in Paris. The most important work of this period was Symphonie pour un homme seul, danced to the musique concrète of Pierre Henry. Béjart's musical tastes were eclectic, and he could just as happily make dances to scores by Albinoni or Gerry Mulligan, or mix electronic sound with Tchaikovsky, as he did later in Nijinsky, Clown of God (1971).

His breakthrough came in 1959 when he created his version of Rite of Spring for a season of dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. The cast was made up of dancers from his own small company, Western Theatre Ballet and Les Ballets Janine Charrat, plus the troupe from the Monnaie. The mix of theatricality and eroticism proved an instant hit and Béjart was invited to become resident choreographer at the Monnaie with a greatly enlarged company which he renamed Ballet of the Twentieth Century.

It was here that forged his reputation, making small works like Webern Opus Five and his homage to Marius Petipa, Ni fleurs ni couronnes (a deconstructed version of the Rose Adagio) as well as monumental works for the vast Forest National arena in Brussels. The company toured widely in Europe.

Béjart attracted some exceptional dancers, notable among them Paolo Bortoluzzi, Shonach Mirk, Maina Gielgud and the Argentinian Jorge Donn who for more than two decades was a central focus of Béjart's life, both professionally and personally. Dancers loved working with him. Many remained with him throughout their careers, despite the modest salaries paid even to principal dancers.

Other famous dancers were happy to work with Béjart for short periods or in specially created works. For Rudolf Nureyev he made a duet, Songs of a Wayfarer, to the Mahler song cycle, which Nureyev danced for many years. Balanchine's muse, Suzanne Farrell, was a member of the company for a period and when she left to rejoin New York City Ballet, Balanchine is said to have remarked that 'she left him as a girl and came back a woman'. Certainly her remarkable technique had not declined during her years in Brussels, since Béjart insisted on a very high standard of teaching for his dancers.

Despite the adulation surrounding him, Béjart remained entirely level-headed, living quite simply. He had a keen and often earthy sense of humour. He made no secret of his homosexuality, and he generally lived alone, even when in long-term relationships. Nor was he backward in expressing his admiration for other choreographers.

In 1987, following a dispute with Gérard Mortier, the new director of the Monnaie, Béjart moved his base from Brussels to Lausanne in Switzerland. In Lausanne he had good working conditions, complete artistic freedom and the possibility of re-establishing the dance and theatre school he had set up in Brussels. (A similar school, Mudra Afrique, operated in Dakar between 1977 and 1985).

He continued working, creating and touring widely. In all, Béjart made more than 200 ballets, besides directing operas, plays and films. Most of his work was for his own company, but he made several ballets for the Paris Opéra (he was offered the directorship there on more than one occasion but always declined). For the Deutsche Oper Berlin, he made an ambitious full-evening work, Ring around "The Ring", which encapsulated all four of the Wagner operas.

Béjart wrote prolifically, including several volumes of autobiography and a novel, Mathilde (1963), plus copious programme notes for his ballets.

Béjart received numerous awards and prizes during his life.

At his best, Béjart produced some of the most exciting dance theatre of our time. Among his astonishingly large output of about 220 creations, the three most likely to survive in the repertoire are his devastatingly simple but gripping Bolero and his highly original treatments of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and The Firebird. In both of these latter, characteristically, he gave more importance than usual to male dancing. His Firebird was the leader of a partisan troop, shot and killed in battle but returning in spirit to inspire continued resistance. For Rite, he abandoned the original idea of a single female sacrificial victim in favour of showing a man and a woman chosen to save their tribe through ritual copulation and death.

Advancing years, and sorrow at the death of some close friends, did not interrupt his activity and originality. He continued making new ballets right up to his death in late-November 2007, in spite of illness (exhaustion plus heart and kidney problems) that required his frequent admission to hospital. His final ballet, Around the World in 80 Minutes, was premiered in Lausanne in December 2007.

Obituary in The Times
Obituary in The Independent

Guthrie McClintic

Guthrie McClintic born 6 August 1893 (d. 1961)

For forty years, actress Katharine Cornell (1893-1974) and her husband, director Guthrie McClintic, sustained one of the most celebrated and successful partnerships in the American theatre.

McClintic first directed Cornell in 1925 when she starred in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. They went on to collaborate on a total of twenty-eight productions, most of which they presented under their own management. They achieved their greatest success in 1931 when, under McClintic's direction, Cornell portrayed Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Even in theatrical circles, little was known about Cornell's and McClintic's sexual lives beyond the general impression that both were gay. However, it seems clear that their relationship was a non-sexual one, at least after the first few years, and that both partners consistently pursued same-sex attachments. Nevertheless, McClintic and Cornell remained a devoted couple from their marriage in 1921 until McClintic's death in 1961.

Guthrie McClintic was born in Seattle, Washington. As a young boy, he ran away from home to join a repertory company. Stranded, he was rescued by his parents, who promised to support him in his theatrical ambitions. After attending local Seattle schools and the University of Washington, McClintic studied at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts from 1910 to 1912.

He began his career as an actor, but soon became a stage manager and casting director for a leading Broadway producer, Winthrop Ames. Ames offered to finance a production for Guthrie to direct as soon as a suitable project could be found.

The turning point in McClintic's and Cornell's lives and careers took place in 1921 when, still working as a casting director, Guthrie saw Cornell during auditions for a play. McClintic (whose first brief marriage to actress Estelle Winwood ended in divorce) and Cornell were wed on September 8, 1921.

On December 23, 1921, McClintic, having found his project, made a successful Broadway directorial debut with a production of A A Milne's The Dover Road. The same year Cornell became a star playing Sydney Fairfield, the daughter of a shell shocked World War I veteran, in Clemence Dane's A Bill of Divorcement.

Cornell and McClintic reached the height of their renown during the 1930s and early 1940s. With McClintic's encouragement, Cornell turned from the melodramas in which she first gained popularity to play a range of classical and challenging contemporary roles.

Cornell worked almost exclusively with McClintic after their initial success together. Throughout his career, however, McClintic continued to direct plays in which Cornell did not appear.

Cornell and McClintic were markedly dissimilar in personality and style of living, and they designed their living arrangements to accommodate these disparities. Offstage, Cornell was, like Greta Garbo (to whom she was often compared), reserved, self-effacing, and somewhat aloof. Over the years, she carried on a handful of long-term romances with women. In contrast, McClintic was nervous, hot-tempered, sociable, gossipy, and sexually promiscuous.

Early in their marriage, the couple rented (and later purchased) a large house at 23 Beekman Place in Manhattan, which they furnished with pieces used in their productions. By mutual agreement, the third floor of the residence was her exclusive domain, the fourth floor was his, while the floors below were open to both.

Their careers faltered after World War II, though McClintic and Cornell continued to enjoy some notable successes, as in their productions of Antony and Cleopatra (1947), which attained a long-run record for that play, and The Constant Wife (1951).

Cornell, who had long suffered from stage fright, retired shortly after McClintic's death in 1961

James Whale

James Whale born 22 July 1889 (d. 1957)

James Whale was born in Dudley, the sixth of seven children. Thought not to be strong enough to follow his father and brothers into the local heavy industries, he trained as a cobbler. Having discovered some talent for illustration, he used his additional income to pay for evening classes at the Dudley School of Arts and Crafts.

In 1915, during World War I, he enlisted in the army and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant. He was taken prisoner of war in 1917, and while imprisoned, discovered a talent for staging theatrical productions. After the war, he returned to Birmingham and embarked on a professional stage career. In 1928, he was given the opportunity to direct two fringe performances of R. C. Sherriff's then unknown First World War play Journey`s End, staring the then also largely unknown Laurence Olivier. The production was such a huge success that it transferred to the West End where it played for 600 performances. Whale was invited to direct the Broadway transfer of the play and subsequently, the Hollywood film version in 1930.

His second film was the first version of Waterloo Bridge - later remade with Olivier and Vivien Leigh. But Whale is best known for his extraordinary and pioneering work in the horror genre - for his third film was Frankenstein (1931).

He subsequently directed The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - all extraordinary and groundbreaking films; apparently influenced by German silent cinema, Whale was one of the first directors ever to move the camera through the shot, creating a new fluidity of movement.

His other notable films include the 1936 version of Showboat and The Man In The Iron Mask (1939) - many of his other films were unsuccessful and have faded into obscurity. He walked away from directing in the early 1940s.

A novel about James Whale The Father of Frankenstein by gay writer Christopher Bram formed the basis for the film Gods and Monsters (1998) in which Ian McKellen played Whale.

In 1929, Whale and David Lewis, a young story editor and later a producer, began a relationship that lasted more than two decades. Although their sexual relationship was an open secret, they lived rather cautiously discreet lives among the English colony in Hollywood. The sexual component of their relationship ended in the early 1950s, but they remained friends until Whale's death. Whale is sometimes described as a closet homosexual, but for the time, he lived quite openly as a gay man in Hollywood.

In later life, he suffered a series of strokes which left him with memory problems and suffering from depression and loneliness - he seemed unable to put his war experiences behind him. He committed suicide by drowning in his swimming pool in 1957 - he was 67. For years, his death was shrouded in mystery as his suicide note, which read: 'The future is just old age and illness and pain ... I must have peace and this is the only way ...' was withheld until by Lewis, until his own death many years later.

Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents born 14 July 1918 (d. 2011)

Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, librettist and Broadway director Arthur Laurents was born in New York City. He served in World War II in an army film production unit where he wrote scripts designed to educate servicemen going overseas, as well as radio plays intended to foster civilian support for the war. The success of his first play Home of the Brave (1945) encouraged him to move to Hollywood. His scripts there included The Snake Pit and Hitchcock's Rope (1948), which starred his then-lover, Farley Granger.

His career damaged by the McCarthy witchhunts - he was blacklisted by Hollywood studio bosses - Laurents returned to New York where he enjoyed success as a playwright, librettist including West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), and director of I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) the 1973 London premiere, the 1989 Broadway revival of Gypsy and La Cage aux Folles (1983) for which he won a Tony award. His collaborations with such major gay talents as Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Herman, Harvey Fierstein, and Jerome Robbins have ensured his place in musical theatre history.

Laurents has also written two novels The Way We Were and The Turning Point, both of which became successful films for which Laurents wrote the screenplays .

Laurents' experience of discrimination as both a Jew and a gay man, intensified by his experience during the Hollywood blacklist period, 'infuses his work with a strong social conscience', even if it is often expressed through strong female characters.

In 2000, Laurents published Original Story By Arthur Laurents: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher, an aspiring actor whom Gore Vidal suggested Laurents seek out at the men's clothing store in Beverly Hills Hatcher was managing at the time. The couple remained together for 52 years. Tom Hatcher, Laurents' life-partner since 1955, died in October, 2006.

Arthur Laurents died in Manhattan, New York, from complications of pneumonia in May 2011. He was 93 years old.

Simon Callow

Simon Callow born 15 June 1949

Simon Philip Hugh Callow, CBE is an English stage, film and television actor. He has also written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Orson Welles and Charles Laughton.

Callow was born in Streatham, London, England to Anglo/French parents and was raised in the Roman Catholic faith of his mother. He studied at the Queen's University of Belfast before giving up his degree course to go into acting at the Drama Centre, London.

He was already a successful stage actor before making his film debut in a minor role in Amadeus in 1984 (having played Mozart in the original stage production at the Royal National Theatre).

By his thirties, Callow was playing character and often comic parts. He starred in several series of the Channel 4 situation comedy, Chance in a Million, as Tom Chance, an eccentric individual to whom coincidences happened regularly. Roles like this and his part in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) brought him a wider audience than his many critically-acclaimed stage appearances. At the same time, he was successful both as a director and as a writer — mostly of works about acting.

One of Callow's best-known works is Love Is Where It Falls, a poignant analysis of his eleven-year relationship with Peggy Ramsay, a prominent theatrical agent. He has also written extensively about Charles Dickens, whom he has played in a one-man show on stage, The Mystery of Charles Dickens and reading from Dickens' work, and on television several times, including in The Unquiet Dead, a 2005 episode of the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who.

He has starred as Count Fosco, the villain of Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White, in film (1997) and on stage (2005, in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in West End).

His many other film appearances include: A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), Shakespeare In Love (1998) and The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

In December 2004, he hosted the London Gay Men's Chorus' Christmas Show, Make the Yuletide Gay at the Barbican Centre in London. He is currently one of the Patrons of the Michael Chekhov Studio London.

Between March and August 2009, he starred as Pozzo in Sean Mathias' production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett opposite Sir Ian McKellen (Estragon), Patrick Stewart (Vladimir) and also Ronald Pickup (Lucky).

Callow is one of the most prominent gay actors in Britain, listed 28th in the Independent's 2007 listing of the most influential gay men and women in the UK. In 1999 he was awarded the CBE for his services to acting.

Callow's last partner was director Daniel Kramer. They shared a house in Camden, North London, but have now ended their relationship.

He was one of the first actors publicly to declare his homosexuality, doing so in his 1984 book Being An Actor. 

Glen Byam Shaw

Glen Byam Shaw born 13 December 1904 (d. 1986)

Glen Byam Shaw was an English actor and theatre director.

He was born in London, the son of artist John Liston Byam Shaw. After youthful relationships with Ivor Novello and the poet, Siegfried Sassoon (who remained one of his closest friends), he married the actress, Angela Baddeley.

As an actor, he worked mostly in the theatre and during the 1930s he began directing in the West End. Between 1947 to 1956 he was the director of the Old Vic Theatre School, part of the Old Vic Theatre Centre, which also included the Young Vic. From 1957 to 1959 he was director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti born 2 November 1906 (d. 1976)

Luchino Visconti, Duke of Modrone was an Italian theatre and cinema director and writer.

Born into a noble and wealthy family (one of the richest of northern Italy) in Milan. His father was the Duke of Modrone, and Visconti had six siblings. Due to his upbringing, Visconti was able to be exposed to art, music and theatre, and meet some of the forerunners in each, such as the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.

In 1936, at the age of 30, he went to Paris and began his film making career as third assistant director in Jean Renoir's Une partie de campagne (1936), thanks to the intercession of a common friend, Coco Chanel. After a short tour to the US, where he visited Hollywood, he returned to Italy to be Renoir's assistant again, this time for La Tosca (1939), a production that was interrupted and later completed by German director Karl Koch because of the war.

Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, at the time the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts) and here presumably met also Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession) (1943), the first Neo-realist movie and an adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Visconti was one Neo-realist director who was able to continue working throughout the 1950s, although he veered away from the Neo-realist path with his 1954 film, Senso, which was also filmed in Technicolor. This film takes place in 1866, in Austrian-occupied Venice and is based on the novella by Camillo Boito. Visconti combines realism and romanticism as a way to break away from Neo-realism.

Visconti was also a celebrated theatre director. During the years 1946-1960 he directed many performances of the Rina Morelli-Paolo Stoppa Company, with Vittorio Gassmann, and several operas, including a famous revival of Donizetti's Anna Bolena at La Scala in 1957 with Maria Callas.

Throughout the 1960s, Visconti’s films became more personal. The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), made in 1963, and based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy. It starred American actor Burt Lancaster in the role of Prince Don Fabrizio.

This film was distributed throughout America and England as well, but in the process Twentieth-Century Fox scaled it down, with important scenes completely deleted. These cuts and the poor dubbing quality ensured that the essence of the film was lost in this version. Visconti repudiated it, and took no responsibility for it whatsoever.

He told an American reporter in 1961, “I believe in life, that is the central point ... I believe in organized society. I think it has a chance.” Even when not focusing on sending a message to his audience about war or poverty, Visconti was still dealing with life and all its glory and hardships.

It was not until his 1969 film, The Damned, that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award, for Best Screenplay. However, he did not win the award. The film, one of Visconti's best-known works, is about a German industrialist family that slowly begins to disintegrate during World War II. The decadence and lavish beauty were archetypes of Visconti's aesthetic.

In 1971 Visconti directed an acclaimed version of Thomas Mann's Death In Venice starring Dirk Bogarde.

Visconti's final film was The Innocent (1976), which has the reoccurring theme of infidelity and betrayal.

Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality. His last partner was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in The Damned [pictured above]. Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig in 1972 and Conversation Piece in 1974 along with Burt Lancaster.

Other lovers included Franco Zeffirelli.

Visconti died in Rome of a stroke at the age of 69.

Moss Hart

Moss Hart born 24 October 1904 (d. 1961)

Moss Hart was an American playwright and director of plays and musical theatre.

After working several years as a director of amateur theatrical groups and an entertainment director at summer resorts, he scored his first Broadway hit with Once In A Lifetime (1930), a farce about the arrival of the sound era in Hollywood. The play was written in collaboration with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman. During the next decade, Kaufman and Hart teamed on a string of successes, including You Can't Take It With You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). Though Kaufman had hits with others, Hart is generally conceded to be his most important collaborator.

In 1940 Kaufman and Hart called it quits. Hart had decided it was time to move on.

Throughout the 1930s, Hart also worked, with and without Kaufman, on several musicals and revues, including As Thousands Cheer (1933), with songs by Irving Berlin, Jubilee (1935), with songs by Cole Porter and I'd Rather Be Right (1937), with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

Hart continued to write plays after parting with Kaufman however, he became best known during this period as a director.

By far his biggest hit was the musical My Fair Lady (1956) with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The show ran over seven years and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hart picked up the Tony for Best Director.

Occasionally, Hart wrote screenplays, including Gentleman's Agreement (1947) — for which he received an Oscar nomination — Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and A Star Is Born (1954).

The last show Hart directed was the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (1960). During a troubled out-of-town tryout, Hart had a heart attack. The show opened before he fully recovered, but he and Lerner reworked it after the opening.

Hart died of heart failure on December 20, 1961. He was 57.

Moody, irritable, and often depressed, Hart was married to Kitty Carlisle, but the well-dressed and longtime bachelor was regarded as homosexual by many of his friends and reportedly spent much time in therapy regarding his attraction to men. (Carlisle did ask him if he was gay before they married and he responded that he was not.) Among his reported affairs was the actor turned writer Gordon Merrick.

In his screenplay for the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen, Hart wrote the following lines for bisexual actor Danny Kaye as the title character: 'You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache.'

Rob Marshall

Rob Marshall born 17 October 1960

Rob Marshall is an American theatre, film director, and choreographer. He is a 6-time Tony nominee, Academy Award nominee, Golden Globe nominee and Emmy winner whose most noted work includes the 2002 film Chicago and the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret.

Marshall began professionally at age 12, when he and his sisters - his sister Kathleen Marshall is now a successful choreographer - made the audition for the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera's production of The Sound of Music. At 13 he appeared in the CLO's productions of The King and I and South Pacific. While a junior at Carnegie Mellon University, he took time off from school to join the touring company of A Chorus Line. He earned a bachelor's degree in musical theatre in 1982, then he moved to New York City, where, during the next few years, he appeared in numerous Broadway shows. Marshall suffered a back injury while performing in Cats, and this eventually he pushed him from performing into choreography.

For Broadway, he choreographed the 1994 revival of Damn Yankees, the 1995 revival of Company, the original production of Victor/Victoria in 1995, and the 1996 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

In 1998, in his most famous work on stage, Marshall choreographed and co-directed Sam Mendes' acclaimed 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret. Marshall received Drama Desk Award nominations and Tony Award nominations for both his direction and choreography. Later that year, in his solo directorial debut, Marshall directed and choreographed the Broadway revival of Little Me. He received Drama Desk and Tony nominations for his choreography.

In 2000, he directed the Broadway premiere of Seussical: The Musical, based of the works of Dr Seuss. His sister Kathleen Marshall choreographed the show.

In 1999, he directed and choreographed Disney's made-for-television remake of the musical Annie, for which he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography and an Emmy Award nomination for direction.

Marshall also directed and produced the 2006 television special Tony Bennett: An American Classic, which was choreographed by partner John DeLuca. For the special, Marshall won a 2007 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Musical/Variety.

In 2002, Marshall received international acclaim for directing and choreographing Chicago, a Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway musical. The hit film starred Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere and Queen Latifah and received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Marshall himself was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Directing. The film also earned him his first Directors Guild of America Award.

In 2005, he directed Memoirs of a Geisha, starring Zhang Ziyi.

Marshall lives in New York City with his long-time partner, John DeLuca, a stage director and choreographer.