O'Connor, Pat

Young years and working on television

Pat O'Connor was born in 1943 in the city of Ardmore , Waterford County in a family of six small business children. At the age of 17, Pat dropped out of school, and left for England , where for 18 months he lived in casual work in London . A year later, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles , graduating from which, he received a bachelor's degree. After that, he went to Toronto, Canada, and in 1969 graduated from Ryerson University with a degree in film and television research. Returning to Ireland, in 1970 O'Connor began working as an intern, and then as a producer and director at the state-owned Raidió Teilifís Éireann in Dublin . Over the next eight years, he created over 45 television and documentaries. In 1976, he began making dramatic feature films for Irish television ^{[5] [6]} .

The Rise of a Career

In 1983, for the film "The Roman in the Ballroom, " an adaptation of the story of William Trevor , starring Brenda Fricker , Pat O'Connor received the British Academy Television Awards in the category “Best Drama Television Movie” ^[7] , which launched his career internationally ^[8] . The following year, for his role in his film The Diary of a Terrorist , this time based on the story of Bernard McLaverty Helen Mirren won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress ^[9] .

O'Connor's next film, “ A Month in the Country ” (1989), on World War I injuries with Colin Firth , Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, received the prize for the best film in the Brussels Film Festival . Previous successes gave O'Connor the opportunity to shoot in Hollywood, where he made the films “ Stars and Stripes ” (1988) with Daniel Day-Lewis and Harry Dean Stanton , and “ January Man ” (1989) with Kevin Klein , Harvey Keitel and Susan Sarandon ^[10] , however, these tapes were unsuccessful. O'Connor returned to Ireland, where he filmed yet another film adaptation of Trevor's short story “ The vicissitudes of fate ” (1990), which became the best film at the Barcelona Film Festival .

The next Circle of Friends (1994), which talks about love in Ireland in the 1950s with Chris O'Donnell and Minnie Driver, became the highest grossing independent film in the United States in its year of release, raising almost $ 24 million ^[11] . Film critic Roger Ebert admitted that this film is a “real treasure”, a friendly and piercing love story, burning with mind and feelings ^[12] . In 1997, O'Connor released the film The Fictional Life of the Abbots , a drama about teenage romance in the 1950s American province with Joaquin Phoenix and Liv Tyler in the lead roles. ^[13] Ebert noted that this film “seems slow and almost moody, and the director, Pat O'Connor, did not show a single moment of cheerful love of human nature that revived his Circle of Friends” ^[14] . The next film, “ Dancing During the Moonlight, ” based on a play by Brian Friel with Meryl Streep in the lead role ^[15], was recognized as one of the best films of 1998 according to the version of the National Council of Film Critics ^[16] .

New Millennium

In 2001, O'Connor made a remake of the 1968 film Sweet November with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron ^[17] . In 2012 , after a ten-year hiatus, Pat O'Connor released the film “ Private Pisful ” about the First World War ^[18] based on the novel of the same name Michael Morpurgo ^[19] .

In 1990, Pat O'Connor married Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio ^[20] . They have two children ^[21] : Jack (b. 1993) and Declan (b. 1996) ^[22] .

• O'Connor, Pat on the Internet Movie Database