Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan (born February 25, 1950, Rosses Point, County Sligo, Ireland) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, and novelist whose atmospheric work often involves violence and explores issues of love and betrayal. He won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for the film The Crying Game (1992), for which he was also nominated for best director.

Early life and writings

Jordan was born in a seaside village in northwestern Ireland, but he grew up in a suburb of Dublin. His father was a teacher and school inspector in a teacher-training college, and his mother was a painter. One of five siblings, three of whom entered careers in the arts, Jordan once described himself as having been a “bookish kid.” After completing his secondary education, he attended University College Dublin, where he studied Irish history and English and cofounded the Irish Writers’ Cooperative.

Jordan began writing short stories while working odd jobs such as substitute teacher and railway porter. He married young and had his first child by the time he was 24 years old. Struggling to find regular employment in Dublin, Jordan moved with his family to London, but they soon returned to Dublin, surviving through an arts grant that Jordan had received for his writing. In 1976 Jordan published a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and secured him some work writing for television.

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First films

In the early 1980s Jordan caught the attention of filmmaker John Boorman with a script about two young Irish Travellers in an arranged marriage. The script was eventually turned into the film Traveller (1981), directed by Joe Comerford. Meanwhile, Boorman hired Jordan as a script consultant on the film Excalibur (1981). In 1982 Jordan won acclaim as a director for his first feature film, Angel, a drama about a saxophone player that is set amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It starred Stephen Rea, who later appeared in a number of Jordan’s films, and featured a dreamlike use of color and lighting.

The director continued to earn praise for such films as the horror fantasy The Company of Wolves (1984), an adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story of the same name, and the neo-noir Mona Lisa (1986), starring Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine. He also directed the comedy fantasy High Spirits (1988), which starred Peter O’Toole, and the crime comedy We’re No Angels (1989), which starred Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, and Demi Moore.

The Crying Game and Hollywood success

The Crying Game (1992), a psychological thriller inspired in part by Frank O’Connor’s 1931 short story “Guests of the Nation,” brought Jordan international renown and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. The film starred Rea as a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who befriends a British soldier (Forest Whitaker) whom the IRA have taken captive. Its success provided Jordan the opportunity to direct Interview with the Vampire (1994), a big-budget adaptation of Anne Rice’s popular novel starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

Jordan subsequently wrote and directed Michael Collins (1996), a biopic of the Irish independence leader (Liam Neeson); The Butcher Boy (1997), a dark comedy based on Pat McCabe’s celebrated novel about a troubled young boy; and The End of the Affair (1999), a romantic drama based on the Graham Greene novel and starring Rea, Ralph Fiennes, and Julianne Moore.

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Other films

At the beginning of the 21st century, Jordan remade Jean-Pierre Melville’s heist film Bob le flambeur (1956) as The Good Thief (2002) and directed Breakfast on Pluto (2005), another adaptation of a McCabe novel, about a transgender woman (Cillian Murphy) who leaves her small Irish town for London. Two years later he directed The Brave One, in which a woman (Jodie Foster) becomes a vigilante after a vicious attack.

Jordan’s subsequent films include Ondine (2009), a fantasy in which a fisherman (Colin Farrell) catches a woman (Alicja Bachleda) in his net and begins to believe that she is a mythical creature, and the moody vampire thriller Byzantium (2012), starring Saoirse Ronan. He later helmed and cowrote Greta (2018), a horror movie starring Isabelle Huppert. Jordan also directed and cowrote (with William Monahan) Marlowe (2022), a crime mystery starring Neeson, Diane Kruger, and Jessica Lange. The film was adapted from John Banville’s novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, which in itself reimagined characters created by Raymond Chandler, including famous private eye Philip Marlowe.

Television work and novels

In addition to his film credits, Jordan created the television series The Borgias (2011–13) and wrote and directed several of its episodes. In 2017 he created the series Riviera, which ran for three seasons and starred Julia Stiles and Lena Olin. Since his debut with Night in Tunisia, Jordan’s other fiction writing has included the novels The Past (1980), Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), Shade (2004), Mistaken (2011), The Drowned Detective (2016), Carnivalesque (2017), The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small (2021), and The Well of Saint Nobody (2023). Jordan’s literary honors include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1981) and the Irish PEN Award for Literature (2004). In 2024 he published a memoir, Amnesiac.