Background
Atom Egoyan was born on 19 July 1960. Of Armenian descent, he was bom in Egypt, where he lived for a few years as a child before moving to western Canada.
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Atom Egoyan was born on 19 July 1960. Of Armenian descent, he was bom in Egypt, where he lived for a few years as a child before moving to western Canada.
Studied at University of Toronto.
After the University of Toronto, and having had painters for parents, he was drawn into filmmaking. He has also done a good deal of work for Canadian television, especially documentaries with musical subjects.
Exotica drew a lot of attention in that it was a story of meetings at a strip club, and a model of his tender observation. Equally, The Sweet Hereafter—taken from a Russell Banks novel—in which an insurance man (Jan Holm) comes to a community devastated by a bus accident, explored so many subtle feelings beyond the evident tragedy. By those standards, Felicia’s Journey (based on a William Trevor novel) seemed heavy- handed—hut that may be a measure ol Ian Holm being more inward an actor than Bob Hoskins. A masterpiece from Egoyan would come as no surprise.
Egoyan is a remarkable and admirable figure. To be a Canadian filmmaker is, in the words of a movie on which Egoyan assisted, to exist in the shadow of Hollywood. And there is no country of which the ordinary American is more dismissive than Canada. But Egoyan has not simply made a fruitful career there, he has impressed the outside world—The Sweet Hereafter, his best-known film but not necessarily his best, won an Oscar nomination for directing (it succumbed to James Cameron and Titanic). Yet he does not seem to have been swayed away from his own course, which is quiet, introspective, rather wistful, and very fond of that delicate area where the imagination becomes the spirit.
Family is very important to him, and he regularly works with his wife, the actress Arsine Khanjian.