Michael Robert Winner net worth is $45 Million. Also know about Michael Robert Winner bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Michael Robert Winner Wiki Biography

Michael Winner was interested in film at an early age, especially writing, which brought him briefly to television. He then moved into directing at age 25, and after a few comedies and vehicles for pop stars, quickly switched to more dramatic films, attaining something of a trade mark for violence – frequently working with Charles Bronson. More … IMDB Wikipedia $45 Million 1935 1935-10-30 2013-01-21 Death Wish (1974) Death Wish II (1982) Director England Hampstead London Michael Robert Winner Michael Winner Net Worth October 30 producer Scorpio The Big Sleep (1978) The Sentinel (1977) UK Writer

Michael Robert Winner Quick Info

Michael Robert Winner Quotes

• (On Julie Christie not being in West 11 (1963)) “The producer, Danny Angel, didn’t even want to test her,, because she’d been tested and rejected for a great many films, including Billy Liar (1963), which she later made when the girl who was chosen became ill. We tested her and immediately said: ‘Marvellous, we’ve discovered a very, very big star.’ The producer said: ‘You’re absolutely mad! Just a B-movie actress. She’ll never be anything! Who would want to fuck Julie Christie?’ To which I said: ‘I would.’ To which the producer responded in front of a large number of people at the screening room in Associated British Studios, Elstree: ‘Well you’re a homosexual.’ That’s how it was in the early 60’s…!! That’s one of the reasons I soon became my own producer. Some months later, I rang Angel: Hollywood’s made a huge mistake. They’ve given your B-actress an Oscar!”
• “I got on wonderfully with all these actors everyone warned me were impossible to work with. Brando, Mitchum, Sophia Loren – they never behaved badly with me. Roman Polanski told me just the other day that Faye Dunaway was totally impossible when they were making Chinatown (1974). Well I can only say to me she was the most professional, wonderful person. But then she did say in her autobiography that the film with me was the only one she ever enjoyed. I called her Fayzie. Even Burt Lancaster. He did try to kill me three times but he was my best friend, a wonderful actor – he just had a terrible temper”.
• My younger self wouldn’t be surprised that he’d become a successful film director. But he’d be impressed at how many great friends I’ve made – Brando, Bob Mitchum, Orson Welles. Oliver Reed was the most wonderful man I ever met. The most sensitive, shy person: he needed drink because he was so terrified of life and people. We’d be on location in Germany and he’d get drunk and piss on the German flag and ‘Heil Hitler!’ up the hotel corridor and then he’d come in the morning very quiet and gentlemanly, not remembering any of it. He was adorable. I wept at his funeral. I was the only person from showbusiness who went. All his so-called friends – Ken Russell, who directed him in all these movies – they couldn’t be bothered to go. Terrible.
• If I could go back I’d pay more attention to my parents. My father was adorable and my mother, though a nutcase and addicted to gambling, was lovely. But at 20 I became a movie director. It was all-consuming. All I wanted to do was make movies, hang around with actors, have affairs with actresses. I was Jack the Lad supreme. Parents just weren’t as interesting. I regret that deeply because they were really real and loved me.
• “I made some mistakes. I turned down The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), The French Connection (1971) – James Bond! Why did I turn down James Bond? It was madness. I never made a film that would have given me the credibility of a few Bonds. Nicolas Roeg told me I shouldn’t look as if I enjoyed directing so much. I thought he was crazy but the English don’t like somebody who apparently enjoys it all. They like you to suffer and talk a load of rubbish about the ethos of the intellectual side of the movie”.
• “When I die, it’s going to be ‘Death Wish director dies’. I don’t mind though – Death Wish (1974) was an epoch-making film. The first film in the history of cinema where the hero kills other civilians. It had never been done before. Since then it has been the most copied film ever. Tarantino put it in his top 10 films ever made”.
• Girlfriends have to be cheerful, light and bright is essential, otherwise, what’s the point?
• I’ve got no fear about death. I’m very happy to snuff it; you have to live with the cards you’ve been dealt with.
• (On regularly being asked to remake Death Wish (1974)) “I don’t want to do something for the sake of it. I am prepared to wait. If I wait until I am buried, too bad”.
• (On Oliver Reed) “Drunks on the whole are immensely quiet and dignified when they’re sober. But when they’re drunk, they’re drunk. They’re two people; they’re Jekyll and Hyde. I remember once I met him in a restaurant and he went out and challenged someone to a fight; he was always doing that and he always lost the fight. So he went out into Hyde Park in a beautiful Savile Row suit to fight this bloke and came back having been thrown in the round pond, he was soaking”.
• “At 16 I was at my peak. It’s been downhill ever since. I had a showbiz column in 26 local newspapers and I was the film critic of the NME. The London Palladium had big stars every two weeks – Dean Martin, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Bob Hope – and they weren’t as protected from the public as they are today. I just went round and met them all. I was, as I still am, extremely shy. But when I wanted or needed something I became this other person, who was an act, and was very determined. I’d known from age five I wanted nothing in life other than to direct films”.
• (His most hated film) I found it impossible to watch Johnny Guitar (1954) with Joan Crawford. It came out to appalling reviews, but later became a sort of cult camp western among the Joan Crawford fan group. I’m not sure what year it was, I would guess mid-50s, but I walked out of my local Odeon – the only time I ever walked out of the cinema. It was just awful, unbelievably slow and nothing seemed to happen. Obviously the industry thought much the same because they didn’t give her another western.
• I’d have Charles Bronson starring in Death Wish XXVI if I thought it would make a profit.
• I do essentially the same things I did as an 18-year-old. I go on dates, I make films, I write. Nothing has really changed.
• I don’t think people are affected by what they see. It’s fantasy, people don’t watch a murder and then go out and commit one.
• I don’t go out much, partly because I get bored sitting next to the same person for three hours and partly because I started giving my hostesses marks out of 10 for their cooking.
• [to Richard Littlejohn, on live TV] I’m quite appalled, and very nearly walked out, to be on a British television program where lesbians are wheeled in for you to make smutty and offensive remarks to. I think it is an absolutely shameful exhibition of vulgarity directed toward a minority. I think the lesbians have come over with considerable dignity and you’ve come over as an arsehole.
• [on censors] They all tended to be failed directors who suddenly find they have power over every director in the world and they misuse it.
• Nearly dying hasn’t taught me a thing. It’s just taught me that being ill is a bloody pain!
• An OBE is what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station. I really don’t care if I get anything or not. I’m very glad that they recognize my considerable skills as a toilet cleaner. But when you look at the rubbish who are getting these awards and the absolute non-service they have given to the nation other than financing or working for political parties, you say, ‘What company am I in?’ At least if you go straight to the House of Lords you can wear fancy dress and have a giggle.
• If you want art, don’t mess about with movies. Buy a Picasso.
• Hitchcock said actors are cattle, but show me a cow who can earn one million dollars per film.
• There’s no moralistic side to Death Wish (1974); it’s a pleasant romp.
• The hardest part of directing is staying awake for nine weeks at a stretch.
• In this business disaster is always just around the corner.
• Success has gone to my stomach.
• A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.
• On late actor-comedian Terry-Thomas: “For years, in the English film business, if you wanted a Terry-Thomas-type comedian, you were lucky if you got Terry-Thomas himself.”.
• My sympathy is totally with the little old lady who gets bashed over the head with an iron bar, not with the youngster who did it and gets sent to the South of France for six weeks to turn into a lovely human being.
• Women like to be treasured for themselves. They don’t get taken in by men with money. In fact, I did far better when I was an assistant director.
• I don’t want to live in a tolerant society. I want to live in a very intolerant society.

Michael Robert Winner Important Facts

• In an interview towards the end of his life, he cited not having children as his regret in life.
• He was going to be interviewed for the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014), but died while the film was in production.
• He was embarrassed by The Cool Mikado (1963), which he dismissed as “absolute nonsense, shot in four weeks on the silent stage in Shepperton”.
• He was a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions and later appeared on television programmes including the BBC TV’s Question Time (1979) and Have I Got News for You (1990).
• Winner was an art collector, and a connoisseur of British illustration. Winner’s art collection includes works by Jan Micker, William James, Edmund Dulac, E. H. Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Beatrix Potter. His collection once included almost 200 signed colour-washed illustrations by Donald McGill.
• His fame as a restaurant critic was such that, at a Cornwall cafe, an unconsumed piece of his serving of lemon drizzle cake was incorporated into the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers.
• Winner claimed during his lifetime to be worth £75 million, with £25m in offshore bank accounts and his home worth an additional £50m. But on his death his bank accounts were frozen, and a formal investigation of his affairs began. During this, it emerged that Winner had been supporting two former lovers, both of whom had been provided with living expenses and accommodation. The financial assistance extended also to his long-term personal assistant, the former Miss Great Britain Dinah May. After investigations, it was revealed that Winner’s total estate was actually worth £16.8m, with total outstanding debts of £12m. In his will, Winner had left his wife a lump sum of £5m, but the residual estate was only worth £4.75m. His former wife, P.A. and lovers engaged probate lawyers to contest the will and their sums due from it. However, it then emerged that none of the newspapers that reported the aforementioned information about Michael’s beneficiaries were correct and that they included only probate information from UK assets when Michael Winner was on record as stating that he had substantial assets in Guernsey. When Guernsey probate was later added, Michael had left a total of £50m and this was more than enough to provide for all his beneficiaries in full while leaving a substantial balance to the Police Memorial Trust.
• He was considered to direct The Wild Geese (1978).
• Winner spent his free time gardening (“my garden is floodlit, so I quite often garden after midnight”) or with a string of girlfriends, notably the actress Jenny Seagrove.
• Winner was an active proponent of law enforcement issues and established the Police Memorial Trust after WPC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in 1984. Thirty-six local memorials honouring police officers who died in the line of duty have been erected since 1985, beginning with Fletcher’s in St. James’s Square, London. The National Police Memorial, opposite St. James’s Park at the junction of Horse Guards Road and The Mall, was also unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 26 April 2005.
• Winner lived in the former home of painter Luke Fildes in Holland Park, Woodland House, designed for Fildes by Richard Norman Shaw. It was announced in 2008 that Winner intended to leave his house as a museum, but discussions with Kensington and Chelsea council apparently stalled after they were unable to meet the £15 million cost of purchasing the freehold of the property, which expires in 2046.
• In September 2011, Winner was admitted to hospital with food poisoning after eating steak tartare, a raw meat dish, four days in a row. The dish is not recommended for those with a weak immune system and in retrospect Winner regarded his decision to eat it as “stupid”.
• He persuaded Oliver Reed to go audition for a part in Gladiator (2000), which turned out to be his final film.
• He featured in TV commercials that he himself directed for insurance company esure between 2002 and 2009, with his trade-mark catchphrase “Calm down, dear! It’s just a commercial!”.
• In 2003, he appeared in a series of adverts for a UK car insurance firm while dressed as a fairy godmother.
• Directed Harry Andrews in five films and James Donald in three feature films.
• January 2008 – Engaged to Géraldine Lynton (aka Geraldine Lynton-Edwards).
• In Dec. 2006, while vacationing at Barbados, he suffered a near-fatal illness from the extremely rare vibrio vulnificus virus, caught when he ate an oyster. After spending 5 days at the local hospital, his friend Philip Green chartered an ambulance plane to fly the director to London. He spent 3 months in the hospital where he ultimately went through 19 operations to save his leg. The virus destroyed his Achilles tendon and he had to walk with a walking stick.
• His favorite actor was Marlon Brando, who was also a friend.
• At one time, he was going to direct Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990), but star Chuck Norris didn’t like the script.
• Tended to get his films done on time and under budget.
• He allegedly declined the O.B.E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2006 for his services to film.
• Employs Dinah May and Joanna Kanska as receptionists.
• He was offered the opportunity to direct The French Connection (1971), Jaws (1975) and the remake of King Kong (1976), both of which he turned down.
• Often used Charles Bronson, Michael Crawford and Oliver Reed.
• Often edited his own films under a different name ‘Arnold Crust’.
• He was a restaurant critic and guested in a television commercial for Kenko instant coffee in which he was spoofing himself.
• An outspoken supporter of the Conservatives for many years, he switched his political allegiance to Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the 1997 UK General Election.

Michael Robert Winner Filmography

Michael Robert Winner Awards