Jane Campion is a New Zealand director and screenwriter. She is the frontrunner for an Academy Award for Directing at the Oscars 2022.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the Jane Campion.
- Her full name is Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion
- She was born 30 April 1954
- She is a New Zealand director, screenwriter, and producer
- She became the second woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director
- Campion is the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme d’Or
- Both of these achievements came for The Piano (1993)
- She is also the first to be nominated twice
- She also won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Piano (1993)
- At the 78th Venice International Film Festival, she won the Silver Lion award for directing The Power of the Dog (2021)
- Campion is also known for directing the films An Angel at My Table (1990), Holy Smoke! (1998), and Bright Star (2009)
- Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand
- She is the second daughter of Edith Campion, an actress, writer, and heiress, and Richard M. Campion, a teacher, and theatre and opera director
- Her maternal great-grandfather was Robert Hannah, a well-known shoe manufacturer for whom Antrim House was built
- Her father came from a family that belonged to the fundamentalist Christian Exclusive Brethren sect
- She has a sister Anna, a year and a half her senior, and a brother, Michael, seven years her junior
- Campion grew up in the world of New Zealand theatre
- Their parents founded the New Zealand Players
- Campion initially rejected the idea of a career in the dramatic arts
- She graduated instead with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975
- In 1976, she enrolled in the Chelsea Art School in London, and traveled throughout Europe
- She earned a graduate diploma in visual arts (painting) from the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney in 1981
- Campion’s later film work was shaped in part by her art school education
- She has, even in her mature career, cited painter Frida Kahlo and sculptor Joseph Beuys as influences
- Campion’s dissatisfaction with the limitations of painting led her to filmmaking and the creation of her first short, Tissues, in 1980
- In 1981, she began studying at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School
- There she made several more short films and graduated in 1984
- In 1992, she married Colin David Englert, an Australian who worked as a second unit director on The Piano
- Their first child, Jasper, was born in 1993 but lived for only 12 days
- Their second child, Alice Englert, was born in 1994, she is an actress
- The couple divorced in 2001
- From the beginning of her career, Campion’s work has received high praise from critics all around
- In V.W. Wexman’s Jane Campion: Interviews (1999), critic David Thomson describes Campion “as one of the best young directors in the world today”
- Similarly, in Sue Gillett’s “More Than Meets The Eye: The Mediation of Affects in Jane Campion’s Sweetie,” Campion’s work is described as “perhaps the fullest and truest way of being faithful to the reality of experience”
- By utilizing the “unsayable” and “unseeable,” she manages to catalyze audience speculation
- Campion’s films tend to gravitate around themes of gender politics, such as seduction and female sexual power
- This has led some to label Campion’s body of work as feminist
- However, Rebecca Flint Marx argues, “while not inaccurate, [the feminist label] fails to fully capture the dilemmas of her characters and the depth of her work”
- Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film
Got anything to add?