Peter Chelsom

Peter Chelsom is a member of the British Academy, the American Academy, The Directors Guild Of America, and The Writers Guild Of America. Peter was born in Blackpool in the North of England. He is a US and UK citizen. (Trivia: he is an Honorary Citizen of a small town in Tuscany, Italy, called Fivizzano). He trained at London's Central School of Drama and worked as an actor playing leading roles in TV, films, and in the theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and the Royal Court Theatre. At 30, Peter became a film director/writer. His first film, Treacle, won a BAFTA nomination and invitations to festivals all over the world. His first full-length feature was the successful romantic comedy, Hear My Song (BAFTA nomination). The film is a wild and highly entertaining tale inspired by the life of the charismatic Irish tenor, Josef Locke, played in the film by Ned Beatty. Hear My Song was praised universally by critics and was a hugely optimistic crowd-pleaser. Princess Diana attended its Royal Premiere, and the Evening Standard British Film Awards awarded the film Best Newcomer. Peter's second feature was Funny Bones, a film about comedy. Made for Hollywood Pictures and starring Oliver Platt, Jerry Lewis, Leslie Caron, and newcomer Lee Evans, it once again won rave reviews in the States and the rest of the world. It won Best Picture at five European Film Festivals and the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards. Bigger, richer and darker than the first, it tells the story of two half brothers - one American and the other British - who will stop at nothing to get a laugh... even murder. His Hollywood films include The Mighty (two Golden Globe Nominations), the perennial Serendipity (John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale), Shall We Dance (Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez), which grossed $170m worldwide, The Space Between Us (Gary Oldman), Hector And The Search For Happiness (Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgard, and Jean Reno), The Space Between Us (Gary Oldman, Asa Butterfield). Recently, he has made two films in Italy. The Italian language film - Security, which reached number 3 on Netflix Movies Worldwide (Marco D'Amore, Ludovica Martino, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Silvio Muccino) and A Sudden Case of Christmas (Danny DeVito). Peter is also known as a photographer, recently invited to exhibit his work at the Milan and Turin Photo Fairs.