Sam Mendes trivia: 44 facts about the director

Sam Mendes is an English film director. His movies include Skyfall, American Beauty and 1917.

So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about his life and career!

1. His full name is Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE
2. He was born on August 1, 1965
3. He is an English film and stage director, producer and screenwriter
4. He is best known for his directoral debut film American Beauty (1999)
5. It earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director
6. He is also known for the crime film Road to Perdition (2002), the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), and the war film 1917 (2019)
7. He also is known for dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1994), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003)
8. He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013)
9. For directing the play The Ferryman, Mendes was awarded the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2019
10. In 2000 Mendes was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for “services to drama”
11. In the same year was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany
12. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain
13. In 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture”
14. Mendes was born in Reading, Berkshire
15. His father, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, is a Roman Catholic of Portuguese Creole descent
16. His mother is an English Jew
17. His grandfather was the British Trinidadian writer Alfred Hubert Mendes
18. Mendes’s parents divorced when he was a child
19. He grew up in Oxfordshire and attended Magdalen College School and Peterhouse, Cambridge
20. There he graduated with a first in English
21. While at Cambridge, he was a member of the Marlowe Society and directed several plays
22. Including a production of Cyrano de Bergerac with Tom Hollander among the cast member
23. He was also a “brilliant” schoolboy cricketer
24. According to Wisden and played for Magdalen College School in 1983 and 1984
25. He also played cricket for Cambridge University
26. Aged 24 Mendes directed a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the West End that starred Judi Dench
27. Soon he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company
28. There his productions, many of them featuring Simon Russell Beale, included Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and The Tempest
29. He worked at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1988 as assistant director on a number of productions
30. Including Major Barbara, and directing in “The Tent”, the second venue
31. He later directed at the Royal National Theatre
32. Helming Edward Bond’s The Sea, Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and Othello with Simon Russell Beale as Iago
33. Mendes and actress Kate Winslet met in 2001
34. Then Mendes approached her about appearing in a play at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, where he was then artistic director
35. They married in May 2003, on what they characterised as a whim, while on holiday in Anguilla
36. Their son Joe Alfie Winslet Mendes was born on 22 December 2003 in New York City
37. Mendes also had a stepdaughter, Mia
38. From Winslet’s first marriage to filmmaker Jim Threapleton
39. Amid intense media speculation of an affair between Mendes and actress Rebecca Hall, he and Winslet announced their separation in 2010
40. They divorced in 2011
41. Mendes and Hall were in a relationship from 2011 to 2013
42. Mendes married trumpeter Alison Balsom in January 2017
43. Their daughter was born in September 2017
44. He was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to drama