- Ben Lewin's career as a writer and director is spread across three continents and includes award-winning documentaries, feature films, TV movies, mini-series and episodic programs. Born in Poland in 1946, he migrated to Australia with his family in 1949. As a young man, Lewin showed great passion for photography and creative writing, and also studied and practiced law. He left his work as a criminal barrister when he was offered a scholarship to the National Film School in England. After graduating, he joined BBC Television as a director on the Nationwide program, followed by other documentary and current affairs programs for Thames, Granada and Channel Four Television. His breakthrough project as a writer/director was The Case of Cruelty to Prawns, a comedy-drama that won the Best Television Film Award at the prestigious Melbourne Film Festival.
Some of Ben's notable credits include the murder mystery feature Georgia, starring Judy Davis, which won eight Australian Film Institute nominations; the much-honored and multi-award winning The Dunera Boys starring Bob Hoskins - the true story of 2,000 English Jews who were mistakenly suspected as Nazi spies and transported to Australia in 1940; the award-winning Matter of Convenience, a tele-movie about marriages of convenience with Jean-Pierre Cassel; and Plead Guilty, Get a Bond, about a tribal aboriginal woman and her conflict with the Australian legal system.
Ben Lewin is best known in the US as the writer and director of comedy features; Paperback Romance, a love story about slightly damaged people starring Anthony LaPaglia and Gia Carides, and the messianic farce The Favor, the Watch and the Very Big Fish, starring Bob Hoskins, Jeff Goldblum and Natasha Richardson. More recently, Ben Lewin brought his distinctive mix of the preposterous and the perceptive to Hollywood Gold, a personal documentary of his misadventures in the Beverly Hills jewelry trade at Oscar time. His episodic television work includes the season's highest-rated episode of Ally McBeal ("Let's Dance") and Touched By An Angel, as well as a number of episodes of the most popular drama series in Australia, Sea Change.
Lewin's most recent accomplishment is the award-winning feature film The Sessions, a moving true-life story based on the sexual awakening of Berkeley-based poet and journalist Mark O'Brien who spent most of his life in an iron lung. Starring Oscar nominees John Hawkes and William H. Macy, and Oscar winner Helen Hunt, the film won numerous international awards including Audience Awards at the 2012 Sundance, San Sebastian and Mill Valley Film Festivals, as well as a 2012 Sundance Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast. In 2013, the lead cast of The Sessions garnered two Independent Spirit Awards for Best Male Lead and Best Supporting Actress, as well as two Golden Globe nominations in the same categories and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
An Australian at heart, Ben has been living and working in California since 1994 and is in development on a number of feature film and television projects. His portfolio and interests are diverse, and include one wife (producer Judi Levine) and three children.- IMDb mini biography by: Ben Lewin
- SpouseJudi Levine(? - present)
- (1968-1971) Criminal barrister in Australia
- As of 2013, has directed 1 Academy Award-nominated performance: Helen Hunt (Best Supporting Actress The Sessions (2012)).
- [on 'The Sessions'] The reason I wanted to tell the story is primarily because it was a good story. [Finding it was] a total accident, when I was surfing the Internet for all the wrong reasons. It was a burning bush moment, of which I've had very few. I thought that if I was emotionally affected, someone else would be as well.
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