Chapter Biographies of 2001: A Space Odyssey - Study Guide by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick

Biographies

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur Charles Clarke was born in 1917 in Somerset. He is a graduate of King's College, London, where he gained a First Class Honours degree in Physics and Mathematics. Interested in technology since childhood, during the Second World War he worked on developing radio equipment for the Royal Air Force. After the war he became Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, and is widely credited with 'inventing' the concept of the communications satellite in a 1945 paper for Wireless World. He began writing science fiction as well as non-fiction 'extrapolations' of the future, and in 1956 his short story The Star won a Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Society. He has written over fifty books, including science fiction classics such as Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, and Rendezvous with Rama. Many of his novels are concerned with the technology and its transforming effect on humanity. In 1968 he shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He has written three sequels to 2001: 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssesy Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

He has lived in Sri Lanka since the mid-1950s, was awarded a CBE in 1989 and, after some controversy, a knighthood on May 26th 2000.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 and grew up in the Bronx, New York. Kubrick had independently financed his first two features (Fear and Desire, 1953; Killer's Kiss, 1955) before gaining the attention of United Artists where he directed two more films (The Killing, 1956; Paths of Glory, 1958). In 1960 he was brought in to replace Anthony Mann to direct Kirk Douglas' production of Spartacus, a film that was to prove a difficult experience for Kubrick. Vowing never again to sacrifice creative control to the producers, studios or acting leads, Kubrick went on in 1962 to direct a movie version of Nabokov's 'unfilmable' book Lolita. He finally received both critical and commercial success with his Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove (1963). His most ambitious project to date 2001: A Space Odyssey followed, took three years to complete, and was finally released in 1968.

Notorious for his painstaking approach to his art, Kubrick was a director many actors wished to work with - but only once. After filming The Shining (1979), Jack Nicholson commented that "He gives new meaning to the word meticulous."

Kubrick's other film credits are A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975) Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) which was completed just a few months before his death. He also received a posthumous producer credit on the Steven Spielberg directed A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) a film Kubrick had been developing since the mid-1980s.