Biography
James Leslie John Woodhead, OBE (born 1937) is a British documentary filmmaker.
For his National Service commencing in 1956, he served in Fife at the Joint Services School for Linguists where he was taught Russian. He was posted to West Berlin to monitor the communications of Soviet pilots flying in and out of East Germany. "The experience I've come to realise since that it shaped my continuing obsession with what was going on in eastern Europe and particularly the Iron Curtain at that time."As a young filmmaker, he was assigned to film a new rock 'n' roll band called The Beatles, playing at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Woodhead first made his name as a reporter for Granada Television's flagship current affairs series World in Action. He remained with Granada for 28 years. Woodhead was among the first exponents of docudrama, a format which allowed him to explore daily life of those "behind the wall" during the Cold War, when journalists had little direct access. Among these were his films Invasion, about Soviet invasion and the Prague Spring of 1968, and Strike which deals with the rise of Solidarność in Poland. In 1999 his documentary film A Cry From The Grave, which documents, hour by hour, the atrocities of the Srebrenica massacre, won awards at four film festivals.
Woodhead went freelance in 1989. Since then, he has made a number of films for BBC's Storyville and Arena series – among them My Life as a Spy, Star Wars Dreams (a history of the American missile defence program). He has also worked with the Sundance channel, making Godless in America, a documentary about the life of Madalyn Murray O'Hair who founded American Atheists and successfully campaigned for the separation of church and state. He was appointed an OBE for services to television in 1994. In 2006, he was nominated for an Emmy for his HBO documentary Children of Beslan about the Beslan school hostage crisis.
Filmography
all 30
Movies 25
Director 25
TV Shows 5
Producer 3
self 1
Narrator 1
Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things (2019)
Diana: The Day Britain Cried (2017)
Diana: The Day We Said Goodbye (2017)
Diana: The Day We Said Goodbye (2017)
The Day They Dropped The Bomb (2015)
The Day Kennedy Died (2013)
The Hunt For Bin Laden (2012)
Histoire immédiate (2011)
9/11: The Day That Changed the World (2011)
How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin (2009)
Godless in America (2006)
Children of Beslan (2005)
Srebrenica: Never Again? (2005)
The Russian Newspaper Murders (2004)
My Life As A Spy (2003)
Star Wars Dreams (2003)
A Very Modern Dictator: A Profile of Slobodan Milosevic (2002)
Endurance (1999)
A Cry from the Grave (1999)
444 Days (1998)
Tony Bennett's New York (1996)
The Last Soviet Citizen (1993)
Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992)
The Tragedy of Flight 103: The Inside Story (1990)
Under the Sun (1989)
The Lau of Malaita (1987)
Television (1985)
Invasion (1980)
NOVA (1974)
The Stones in the Park (1969)
Ratings
Information
Known ForDirecting
GenderMale
Birthday1937-01-01 (87 years old)
CitizenshipsUnited Kingdom
AwardsOfficer of the Order of the British Empire
This article uses material from Wikipedia.
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