Age: 60
male
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours List. In 2000, Mendes was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". Born in Berkshire to a Trinidadian Catholic father and an English Jewish mother, Mendes grew up in North London. He read English at Peterhouse at Cambridge University. He began directing plays there before joining Donmar Warehouse, a centre of 1990s London theatre culture. In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1993), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003). For the first time, he directed an original West End stage musical with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013). For his work on the London stage, Mendes has received three Laurence Olivier Awards for Company, Twelfth Night, and The Ferryman. On Broadway, he earned two Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play for The Ferryman in 2019 and The Lehman Trilogy in 2022. In film, he made his directorial debut with the drama American Beauty (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director. He has since directed the films Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), and the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). For the war film 1917 (2019), he received the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sam Mendes, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
In 10191, Duke Leto I of House Atreides, ruler of the ocean planet Caladan, is assigned by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV to serve as fief ruler of Arrakis, a harsh desert planet. Arrakis is the only source of melange, or "spice", a priceless substance that extends human vitality and is critical for interstellar travel. They are to replace the House Harkonnen, who have withdrawn from Arrakis on Shaddam's orders. In reality, Shaddam intends to use his Sardaukar troops to eradicate House Atreides and stage a coup to allow House Harkonnen to re-take the planet shortly after their arrival. Leto is apprehensive of the assignment, but sees it as an opportunity to bond with Arrakis’ native population, the Fremen, as a first step to bring peace throughout all the Houses.
