Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold, OBE (born 5 April 1961) is an English filmmaker and former actress. She won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. She has since made the leap to feature films and television, including Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), and American Honey (2016), all of which have won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Arnold has also directed four episodes of the Emmy Award-winning series Transparent, as well as all seven episodes of the second season of the Emmy Award-winning series Big Little Lies. 2Early life Arnold was born in Dartford, Kent, the eldest of four children. She was born when her mother was only 16 years old and her father was 17, and they separated when she was very young. Her mother had to bring up all four children alone, which is reminiscent of Arnold's own directorial debut short, Wasp. When people are asked if the story is in any way biographical, Arnold replies "I grew up in a working class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know."As a young girl, she was writing dark stories about human experience. In an interview, Arnold speaks about how when she was 10 years old, she wrote her first play that expressed her "horror" of the slave trade, and a few years later while studying for a dance GCSE, she made a performance piece; "I took quotes from the Diary of Anne Frank and read them aloud as I moved around the room. All the other kids would just bung on some pop music and danc