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Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway
84 years (Apr 5, 1942)
Newport, Gwent, Wales, UK
37 Directed
1 TV Directed

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway is an English director born in Newport, Wales, celebrated for formally audacious, painterly films that treat cinema as a visual art form governed by mathematical structure and elaborate composition. The Draughtsman's Contract established his reputation for meticulously composed period tableaux layered with cryptic narrative puzzles, while The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a grotesque and visually sumptuous revenge tale, became his most widely seen and notorious work for its explicit violence and sexuality. Drowning by Numbers and A Zed & Two Noughts extended his fascination with numerical and structural games embedded within lush, tableau-like visual compositions. Greenaway's treatment of narrative as secondary to composition, color, and formal structure has made him one of the most rigorously painterly and intellectually demanding directors in modern European cinema.
Peter Greenaway is an English director born in Newport, Wales, celebrated for formally audacious, painterly films that treat cinema as a visual art form governed by mathematical structure and elaborate composition. The Draughtsman's Contract established his reputation for meticulously composed period tableaux layered with cryptic narrative puzzles, while The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a grotesque and visually sumptuous revenge tale, became his most widely seen and notorious work for its explicit violence and sexuality. Drowning by Numbers and A Zed & Two Noughts extended his fascination with numerical and structural games embedded within lush, tableau-like visual compositions. Greenaway's treatment of narrative as secondary to composition, color, and formal structure has made him one of the most rigorously painterly and intellectually demanding directors in modern European cinema.
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Full Filmography
Blondi
Writer
★ 7.0
2025
Film
The Exile
Director
2022
Film
Giovanna D'Arco
Director
2016
Film
Eisenstein in Guanajuato
Director
★ 6.1
2015
Film
3x3D
Director
★ 4.5
2013
Film
Goltzius & the Pelican Company
Director
★ 6.1
2012
Film
Nightwatching
Director
★ 6.2
2007
Film
Peopling The Palaces
Director
★ 10.0
2007
Film
A Life in Suitcases: A History of Tulse Luper
Director
★ 5.8
2005
Film
Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Peter Greenaway and where are they from?
Peter Greenaway is 84 years old, born on April 5, 1942 in Newport, Gwent, Wales, UK.
What are the most famous roles of Peter Greenaway?
Peter Greenaway is best known for directing The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Draughtsman's Contract, Drowning by Numbers.
How many movies has Peter Greenaway directed?
Over a 64-year career (since 1962), Peter Greenaway has directed or written 37 films and worked on 1 TV shows.
What was Peter Greenaway's first movie?
The career of Peter Greenaway began with Bosch ().
What is Peter Greenaway's most recent movie or series?
Peter Greenaway's most recent release is Blondi, which premiered on August 14, 2025.
What TV shows has Peter Greenaway created or directed?
On television, Peter Greenaway has appeared in A TV Dante.
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Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway
1942-04-05 · Newport, Gwent, Wales, UK

Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942) is a Welsh writer-director, painter, and video artist based in Amsterdam. Throughout the late 1960s and '70s, he produced several experimental documentary/mockumentary shorts while working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information. This early period culminated in "The Falls" (1980), a three-hour mockumentary indexing the strange effects of the VUE (the Violent Unknown Event) on 92 people whose names begin with the letters F-A-L-L. He made his dramatic feature film debut with "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), and throughout the 1980s directed a string of critically acclaimed and frequently controversial films: "A Zed & Two Noughts" (1985), "The Belly of an Architect" (1987), "Drowning by Numbers" (1988), and his best-known work, the vicious Thatcher-era satire "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" (1989). In the 1990s, he directed the Shakespeare adaptation "Prospero's Books" (1991), controversial religious satire "The Baby of Mâcon" (1993), erotic drama "The Pillow Book" (1996), and "8½ Women" (1999), an homage to the films of Federico Fellini, a major influence on Greenaway. In the early 2000s, Greenaway embarked on the ambitious "Tulse Luper" project, a multimedia body of historical fiction revolving around the life of the eponymous fictional hero. In addition to novels, CD-ROMs, online material, and a touring exhibition, the project spawned a trilogy of feature films: "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story" (2003), "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea" (2004), and "The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish" (2004). The trilogy was followed by a fourth feature, "A Life in Suitcases" (2005), which abridges the Tulse Luper saga into a single film. Since the mid 2000s, Greenaway's film work has focused on idiosyncratic, heavily fictionalised biopics dedicated to some of his favourite artists: Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn in "Nightwatching" (2007), Dutch Baroque engraver Hendrik Goltzius in "Goltzius and the Pelican Company" (2012), Soviet Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" (2015), and Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in "Walking to Paris" (TBD). Greenaway has lived and worked in Amsterdam since the mid 1990s. He is married to artist Saskia Boddeke, with whom he has two children. He also has two children from a previous marriage to potter Carol Greenaway.

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