Background
Marsh was born in Truro, Cornwall and raised in Sennen, a Cornish village, and Woolwich, a district in southeast London.
Marsh was born in Truro, Cornwall and raised in Sennen, a Cornish village, and Woolwich, a district in southeast London.
As an undergraduate, he studied at Street Catherine"s College, Oxford and graduated with a degree in English.
In Woolwich, he lived in a "miserable council flat" with his family. Marsh began his early career in directing with several documentaries made for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Later came The Burger and the King: The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley, in 1995, and the Welsh musician John Cale, which was made in 1998. His relationship continued with the British Broadcasting Corporation as a producer in 1993 for three Arena series episodes.
In 2005 he directed the film The King which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
In 2008 he made the documentary Manitoba on Wire, about Philippe Petit"s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New New York The film, called "exhilarating", has had a hugely positive audience response and was among the Top Ten Films of 2008 on many critics" lists.
In 2009, he directed the "1980" episode of Red Riding, which aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. He also directed Project Nim in 2010, which is based on the book Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human by Elizabeth Hess. lieutenant is a documentary about the landmark study conducted by Herbert South. Terrace on the subject of animal language acquisition and the subject of the study is a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky.
Marsh watched different films to gain inspiration before making Project Nim.
He watched East.T., Frederick Wiseman"s Primate, and the Bresson film Au hasard Balthazar. He gained the most information from Au hasard Balthazar which is a fictional account of a donkey as it passes through various human owners. The structure of Project Nim reflects a lot from this film as we see the drama of the human world through the eyes of the chimpanzee.
In 2012, he directed Shadow Dancer, a joint Irish/United Kingdom production about the Irish republican movement, which was filmed in Dublin and London.
The film features Clive Owen, Andrea Riseborough, Gillian Anderson, Domhnall Gleeson and Aidan Gillen. Most recently he directed The Theory of Everything, a biopic on Stephen Hawking starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones.