Born on 5 April 1942, in Newport, Wales. He was trained as a painter and first exhibited his pictures at the Lord's Gallery in 1964. He began working as a film editor in 1965 and spent eleven years cutting films, including numerous documentaries for the Central Office of Information. In 1966 he started making his own films and since then has continued to produce films, paintings, novels and illustrated books.
After shorts such as Windows (1975), which displayed his fondness for lists (in this case cataloguing all the people who died in a small village by falling out of windows), Greenaway attracted some attention for such vivid medium length works as Vertical Features Remake and the humorous A Walk-Through H (both 1978). He began to garner considerable acclaim on the international festival circuit, and in 1980 made his first feature-length film, a "documentary" set in the future, The Falls (1980), chock- full of his trademark riddles and conundrums as he relates the lives of 92 victims (whose names begin with "Fall") of the Violent Unexplained Event involving birds Greenaway hit the limelight in 1982 with the release of his feature, The Draughtsman's Contract.
Although The Draughtsman's Contract has put the English art film back on the map, Greenaway's next three features did not meet with comparable success. A Zed & Two Noughes (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987) and Drowning by Numbers (1987) are undermined in the eyes of some by their rigid formalism, though they remain intriguing and visually absorbing.
The director returned to a more accessible form with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), a visceral study of haute cuisine, adultery and murder centred on a riveting performance by Michael Gambon as a sadistic foul-mouthed gangster. Thanks to its relatively conventional narrative and its violent, controversial imagery, the film brough Greenaway his first substantial recognition in the US. His Death in the Seine, also released in 1989, was of Greenaway's fine and pedantic catalogue film, a potently morbid taxonomy of all drowning victims in the Parisian River between 1795 and One 1801 that ended up not being bought by British TV.
As promised Greenaway followed with Prospero's Books (1991), a film which elicited a great variety of opinion, from claims of the works near divinity as an intertextual late modernist revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest to a view of it as an airless work, a connoisseur's film, jam-packed with visual marginalia and pretence. Here the listing was of the 24 tomes the Bard's wizard brought with him to his island of exile. This prolific period was capped by Darwin (1992), revision of the biopic genre, and The Baby of Macon (1993), another grim semi-satire in an imaginary court of the Medicis in 17th century and the second part of a historical trilogy that started with Prospero's Books. Gremaway's last picture is The Pillow Book (1996), another visual essay based on a classical Japanese text.
