Sir Alan Parker is among the most garlanded filmmakers in BAFTA history. His presentation of the Fellowship in 2013 was the seventh award from BAFTA in a career which spanned more than four decades and 14 features. Five cited his work on such films as Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988) and The Commitments (1991), while a sixth, presented in 1984 when Parker was barely 40, was the Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema award. He has seven additional nominations and two Oscar nominations.
His shelf-full of BAFTA trophies doesn’t even begin to convey the extraordinary breadth of Parker’s other film-related activities, which include stints as chair of the British Film Institute and the inaugural chair of the British (later UK) Film Council. A knighthood in 2002 followed his CBE in 1995.
And yet his entry into directing arrived more by good luck than judgement. He left school with few qualifications and ended up in the post room of an advertising agency, but, with a love of writing, he soon moved on to copywriting. In his early 20s, he was hired by one of the most successful and influential agencies in the UK, Collett Dickenson & Pearce (CDP), where he was working alongside the likes of David Puttnam and Charles Saatchi. After a series of successful campaigns, Parker was granted a generous, interest-free loan from CDP in 1970 to start up his own production company to make television commercials, still in their infancy at the time.
He poached producer Alan Marshall from CDP and together they set up shop in Soho. It was through making a series of award-winning ads, mostly for CDP, that Parker honed his craft. Marshall and Parker made seven features together over the next dozen years, including Fame (1980), Birdy (1984) and Angel Heart (1987). However, before they embarked on their first movie, Bugsy Malone in 1976, Parker’s own full-length debut was with Jack Rosenthal’s The Evacuees for the BBC, which earned him his first BAFTA for Best Single Play.
Parker made his last film, The Life of David Gale, in 2003, although he continued to remain active in the film and television industries supporting various organisations and events.
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