Guy Ritchie
Director — born 1968
Guy Ritchie is an acclaimed British film director, producer and screenwriter.
Guy Ritchie is an English filmmaker and screenwriter whose three-decade career has produced multiple defining English crime-comedy films — particularly his 1998 directorial debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his 2000 second film Snatch, and his 2009 lead-direction of Sherlock Holmes. He was born Guy Stuart Ritchie on September 10, 1968, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England, into an English working-class family. His father John Vivian Ritchie was a King's Royal Hussars Army officer turned advertising-executive, and his mother Amber Parkinson was a homemaker.
His education at the Stanbridge Earls School in Hampshire (1985; without earning a degree, after his expulsion at age 17 for cannabis-possession offenses) preceded his late-1980s and early-1990s English film-industry career. His 1990s work as a music-video director and as a Soho-area film-production-trainee under English film producer Trudie Styler launched his early-career English film-industry public profile.
His 1995 first English short film The Hard Case — and his subsequent 1998 first commercial feature-film directorial debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — launched his late-1990s and 2000s English crime-comedy film public profile. The 1998 directorial debut produced approximately $28 million worldwide on a $1.35 million production budget and launched the early-career careers of Jason Statham (his first major feature-film lead role) and Vinnie Jones.
His 2000 second feature film Snatch (alongside Brad Pitt, Benicio del Toro, and Jason Statham) extended his English crime-comedy film public profile. His subsequent 2009 lead-direction of Sherlock Holmes (alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law) and the 2011 sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows produced his 2010s American film-director public profile. His 2019 lead-direction of Disney's live-action Aladdin (alongside Will Smith) grossed $1.05 billion worldwide. He married American singer Madonna in 2000 (divorced 2008), and they have one biological son and one Malawi-adopted son. He has been with English model Jacqui Ainsley since 2010 (married 2015), and the couple has three children.
His name Guy derives from the Old French Guy (from the Old Germanic root meaning "forest" or "wide"). Guy has been a popular American boys' name across the late 19th and 20th centuries.