ANDREA ARNOLD
Andrea Arnold was born on April 5th, 1961 and is extremely well known for being an English
film maker. Arnold was born in the Kent which is situated in the South East of England. She was
born to parents who were only sixteen and seventeen years old making her connection with
social realism - with teenage pregnancy being a social issue - arise from a very early age.
Arnold is the eldest of four children and grew up in a normal, working family's home. She wrote
very emotional stories from a young age which pushed her towards becoming a director after
she decided to retire from her acting career.
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She attended a private school in Los Angeles where she studied for film directing and she
eventually directed her first film called Milk. She then won an Academy Award for The Best Live
Action Short Film. One of her more recent awards would be the BAFTA Award for being a
Deputy Writer.
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When Arnold was a young girl, her and her siblings were being raised by her mother so she
decided that she wanted to go to work and help her mother provide for the family. She said that
her house was a "working household" which was similar to the majority of families living in the UK.
In 2009, Arnold released an award winning film called Fish Tank. The film was based on a teenaged girl who lived on a council estate. It focused on her lifestyle and how she a part of a broken family that felt really disconnected. One of the main reasons behind the huge success of this film would most likely be because it came from Arnold's own past and her own heart. In many ways, she could probably find that she could relate to the young girl in the film and because of the passion and reality of it, the film appealed to a mass audience and a great number of people within society.
