Date of Birth: 27 November 1951
Place of Birth: San Carlos, California, USA
Date of Death:
Place of Death:
Main Occupations: director, writer
An American director, producer and screenwriter, best known in genre circles for her films Near Dark (1987) and Strange Days (1995) and beyond it, for Point Break (1991) and The Hurt Locker (2006), the latter winning her Best Director and Best Picture Oscars in 2009. Born in San Carlos, California in 1951, she initially took an interest in painting, attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the autumn of 1970, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in December 1972. She also studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York and tried for a while to make a living from her art. She dabbled with acting with a small role in Richard Serra’s video Prisoner’s Dilemma (1974). Other early acting roles included parts in a drama documentary, Struggle in New York (1976), and a turn as a feminist newspaper editor in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983). She also worked briefly as a model.
She studied film theory and criticism at master’s level at Columbia University and began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts and made her first short film, the experimental The Set-Up (1978) as part of her studies. In 1981, she was able to finance her first feature, the biker film The Loveless (1981) which she co-directed with Monty Montgomery and she followed it with the modern vampire thriller Near Dark. At the suggestion of Canadian director James Cameron (they would subsequently be married between 1989 and 1991), she cast Bill Paxton, Jeanette Goldstein and Lance Henriksen from his recent film Aliens (1986) – Michael Biehn was initially offered the role of Jesse Hooker, but he turned it down and Henriksen took the part. The film wasn’t a box office success (Bigelow has attributed its poor performance to it being released around the same time as another vampire film, The Lost Boys (1987)) but it has become a cult favourite in the years since.
Blue Steel (1990) cast Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop being stalked by a psychopath but her breakout film was the action thriller Point Break, with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Through critics were sniffy about the film, it was a box office hit. 1993 saw her working in television, on an episode of Bruce Wagner’s science fiction miniseries Wild Palms before she returned to the big screen for more SF in Strange Days, written and produced by her then ex-husband James Cameron. It was a commercial flop and more television followed, including episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street.
In 2000, she released The Weight of Water, a smaller scale, more personal and more experimental drama based on the novel by Anita Shreve before returning to action cinema in 2002 with K-19: The Widowmaker. It too was a box office disappointment, but Bigelow’s fortunes were about to change with the release of the award-winning war drama The Hurt Locker in 2009, which opened to almost universal critical acclaim and excellent box office. When Bigelow accepted the Oscar for Best Director, she was the first woman director to do so and only the fourth to be nominated, though Bigelow has always been wary of identifying herself as simply a “woman filmmaker.” Another thriller, Zero Dark Thirty, followed in 2012 which was also a critical and commercial success, earning Bigelow the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director though Detroit (2017), about the 1967 riots in the eponymous city, performed less well at the box office.
In May 2024, it was announced that Bigelow had signed with Netflix to make another feature film, at the time of writing untitled, allegedly about White House officials dealing with an imminent attack on the USA.
Genre filmography
Born in Flames (1983) – actor (newspaper editor)
Near Dark (1987) – director, writer
Blue Steel (1990) – director, writer
Wild Palms: Rising Sons (1993) – director
Strange Days (1995) – director
