Biography
Stephen Woolley is an English film producer and director, whose prolific career has spanned over four decades, for which he was awarded the prestigious BAFTA award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema in February 2019. As a producer he has been Oscar-nominated for The Crying Game (1992), and has also produced multi-Academy Award-nominated films including Mona Lisa (1986), Little Voice (1998), Michael Collins (1996), The End of the Affair (1999), Interview with a Vampire (1993), Carol (2016) and Living (2022). He runs the production company Number 9 Films with his partner Elizabeth Karlsen.
Woolley's first film as a producer was The Company of Wolves (1984), but his career began earlier in 1976 as an usher at London's art-house cinema The Screen on the Green in Islington. He then joined the exhibition arm of film collective The Other Cinema in the West End of London, before going on to own and run his own ground breaking legendary repertory cinema, The Scala Cinema, on the same premises which later moved to Kings Cross. In the early 1980s, he established Palace Video in partnership with Nik Powell to distribute the types of cult cinema and international art films that had been the core of his Scala cinema programs.
Palace Video titles included David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), and Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982). It later grew into a theatrical distribution company, re-titled Palace Pictures, where Woolley was behind the UK releases of French cult film Diva (1981), Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), the Coen brothers' Blood Simple (1984), Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1988) - as well as films by John Cassavetes, John Waters, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Peter Greenaway, Fassbinder, and Bertolucci. Palace Pictures moved into film production in 1984 with its first feature The Company of Wolves - directed by Neil Jordan (the first of many films Woolley and Jordan would later make together).
Many of Palace Pictures projects were first supported by Channel 4, and Woolley also helped establish many first-time directors . Powell and Woolley established an association with Miramax, which distributed a number of Palace films in the United States, including Scandal (1989), A Rage in Harlem (1991), Hardware (1990) and The Crying Game (1992).
Woolley had established his reputation with a series of low budget but high production value releases but began developing more ambitious projects.
After the closure of Palace Pictures in 1992, Woolley and Powell went on to found Scala Pictures, where they made Backbeat (1994), Neon Bible (1995) Fever Pitch (1997) Little Voice (1998), Twenty Four Seven (1997), and a series of low budget UK features. Simultaneously, Woolley made three Studio pictures with Warner Brothers, and with Neil Jordan after their worldwide box office hit of Interview with the Vampire (1994) starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Michael Collins (1996 ) with Liam Neeson (which won the Golden Lion at Venice), Woolley and Jordan formed a company, Company of Wolves, funded by DreamWorks, with which they produced In Dreams (1999), The Actors (2003), Intermission (2003), and Not I (2000).
Number 9 Films was set up in 2002, with longstanding producing partner Elizabeth Karlsen. Their films include When Did You Last See Your Father (2007) Breakfast on Pluto (2005), How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008), Made in Dagenham (2010), Byzantium (2012 ), Great Expectations (2012), Hyena (2014) Their Finest (2015),Carol (2015), Youth ( 2015 ) The Limehouse Golem (2016), On Chesil Beach (2017), Mothering Sunday (2021) and Living (2022).
For 2024 Woolley and Karlsen have produced films The Salt Path which stars Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs and The Assessment starring Alicia Vikander Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, and are also in production for the upcoming UK/Japanese feature A Pale View of Hills. Reuniting once again with Kazou Ishiguro.
Woolley made his directorial debut the 2005 film Stoned, a biopic of Brian Jones. And is the recipient of the highly prestigious PGA (Producers Guild Award) for the Crying Game.
5 wins and 14 nominations
