 After years working in children's television, Andrea Arnold came relatively
late to directing, but her films instantly made ripples internationally,
attracting enormous acclaim. Hard to pin down but often centred on female,
working-class characters and marked by simple, unsettling images and intricate
editing, their surface harshness is shot through with complexity and compassion.
The eldest of four children, she was born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford,
Kent, where she grew up on a council estate of the sort that would form the
setting for her own work; her parents, in their teens when she was born,
separated while she was still a child. Leaving school at 18, she moved to
London, where her taste, she recalls, was shaped by such contemporary films as
Apocalypse Now (US, d. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Alien (US/UK, d. Ridley
Scott, 1979), The Elephant Man (US, d. David Lynch, 1980) and Blood Simple (US,
d. Joel Coen, 1984), although their influence on her work isn't easy to detect.
She joined the dance troupe Zoo, appearing on television shows that included
Top of the Pops (BBC, 1964-2006), but came to prominence as an actress and
presenter alongside Sandi Toksvig, Nick Staverson and Neil Buchanan in No. 73
(ITV, 1982-88), a children's show that blended chat, magazine items and comedy.
She remained briefly on board when the programme was renamed 7T3 in 1988, then
presented two other series: Motormouth (ITV, 1988-90) and A Beetle Called Derek
(ITV, 1990-91), a show promoting environmental awareness in teenagers, some
episodes of which Arnold also wrote.
In the 1990s, she spent a year studying at the American Film Institute in Los
Angeles, then returned to England and had a daughter with her partner, a
software engineer. Her first two shorts, Milk (1998) and Dog (2001), were both
selected for Cannes and her third, Wasp (2003), about a single mother who leaves
her four kids alone in a pub car-park to meet an old lover, won the Academy
Award for Best Live Action Short.
She was then invited to join The Advance Party, a project instigated by the
Danish director Lars von Trier to make three films by different first-time
directors incorporating the same set of characters. Set in Glasgow, Arnold's
contribution, Red Road (2006), followed Kate Dickie's solitary CCTV operator as
she becomes obsessed with the man responsible for the death of her husband and
child. Competing in Cannes, it won the Jury Prize. A second instalment in the
trilogy, Donkeys (d. Morag McKinnon), followed in 2010.
Arnold returned south for Fish Tank (2009), about a combative 15-year-old
(played by the electrifying newcomer Katie Jarvis) living on an Essex sink
estate who dreams of escaping through her passion for dance, aided by her
mother's likeable, highly ambiguous new boyfriend. It too won the Jury Prize in
Cannes. She is currently planning an adaptation of Wuthering Heights; written by
Olivia Hetreed, it will be the first time Arnold has not worked with her own
screenplay.
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
