Michael Hoffman

Michael Hoffman's adaptation, which he wrote and directed, of The Last Station, Jay Parini's novel about the last years of the life of Leo Tolstoy, starring Christopher Plummer as the great Russian author and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya, won the award for Best Literary Adaptation at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Award at Rome Film Festival and both Mirren and Christopher Plummer were nominated for Golden Globe Awards.

Hoffman, an American, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Idaho University, where he was a founder member of the Idaho Shakespeare Company. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he directed his first film, Privileged that also marked the debut of actor Hugh Grant.

Hoffman began a long working relationship with the Sundance Institute when he was invited to workshop his script Promised Land at the 1983 Filmmaker's Lab. The film was eventually produced by Robert Redford's Wildwood Productions and was released in1987 starring Meg Ryan and Kiefer Sutherland. Hoffman made a second film for Wildwood, festival favorite Some Girls (a.k.a. Sisters) with Patrick Dempsey and Jennifer Connolly in 1988. In 1991, he made the move to the studio world with Paramount's hit comedy Soapdish starring Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Downey Jr, Teri Hatcher, and Elizabeth Shue.

He reteamed with Robert Downey Jr to make the period romance Restoration which also starred Meg Ryan, Polly Walker, Hugh Grant, Ian McKellan and David Thewlis. The film won two Oscars in 1996. Hoffman's next film was the romantic comedy One Fine Day with George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, followed in 1998 by William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream starring Pfeiffer again along with Kevin Kline, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Sam Rockwell and Rupert Everett for which he also wrote the screenplay. In 2001, he worked again with Kevin Kline and newcomer Emil Hirsch on the classroom drama The Emperor's Club, which made a number of critics' top ten lists.

In 2004, he directed Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr and Griffin Dunne in award winning novelist Don Delillo's Game Six for his own company Serenade Films which premiered at the Sundance Film festival. He also made a documentary for ESPN, Out of the Blue, a film about Life and Football and wrote an HBO pilot about the American intelligence community in the Middle East with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh.

Michael Lobell Productions