Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen

Sir Steven Rodney McQueen (born 9 October 1969) is a British artist, film director and screenwriter. For his 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, a historical drama adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative memoir, he won an Academy Award, BAFTA Award for Best Film, and Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, as a producer, and he also received the award for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle. McQueen is the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen frequently collaborates with actor Michael Fassbender, who has starred in three of McQueen's four feature films. McQueen's other feature films are Hunger (2008), a historical drama about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, Shame (2011), a drama about an executive struggling with sex addiction, and Widows (2018), a thriller about a group of women who are forced into doing a heist to pay off criminals after their husbands are killed in a heist gone wrong. For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. In 2006, he produced Queen and Country, which commemorates the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. For services to the visual arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011. In April 2014, TIME magazine included McQueen in its annual TIME 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World." In October 2016, McQueen was granted the British Film Institute's highest honour, the BFI Fellowship. He was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours, for services to film.

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