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Born on September 10, 1968 in Hatfield, UK, Guy Ritchie (Guy Stuart Ritchie) is a British director, screenwriter and producer, known for Snatch, The Gentlemen, Sherlock Holmes, and more.
Guy is the son of Hamlet sales manager John Vivian Ritchie and wife Amber Parkinson; he has an older sister, Tabitha, who’s a dance teacher, and a half-brother named Kevin Bayton. When Guy was five years old, his parents divorced; not long later, his mum married Sir Michael Leighton. As a boy, Guy, who was dyslexic, attended a special school named Stanbridge Earls, from which he was expelled when he was caught using drugs. So, the director left school when he was sixteen years old, but that didn’t matter, as he was already dreaming about making movies.
Guy Ritche has always been drawn to the crime genre. His first short, The Hard Case (1995), is about four East End lads raising money for a card game. Not long later, after directing a couple of music videos, he wrote and directed his first feature, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), which he also produced with his brother, with whom he founded production company “Ska Films”. Fame came with his next movie, the Brad Pitt-starring Snatch, which still serves as the perfect showcase of the filmmaker’s storytelling and filmmaking style.
Ritchie became even more famous when he married Madonna, in 2000, for whom he also shot the music video Madonna: What It Feels Like for a Girl (2001). In the late 2000s, Ritchie went on to direct more acclaimed features, like the Gerard Butler-starring RocknRolla (2008) and the beloved Sherlock Holmes (2009), with whom he reached a wider audience. In 2011 came its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which was just as successful.
Then came The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), King Arthur (2017), and his collaboration with Disney on the live-action remake of Aladdin (2019). In 2019, he also made what would become one of his most popular movies, The Gentlemen (2019), which also inspired a Netflix series that he would direct in 2024. Among his latest projects are The Covenant (2023), The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024), and short film Touching Hands (2024).
Guy Ritchie is currently working on TV series MobLand and Young Sherlock, and on upcoming movies In the Grey, Wilfe and Dog, Fountain of Youth, and Aladdin 2.
Image credit: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images
