Sam Mendes Sam Mendes Samuel Alexander Mendes (born 1 August 1965) is an English stage and film director best known for directing the drama film "American Beauty" (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the crime film "Road to Perdition" (2002), and the "James Bond" films "Skyfall" (2012) and "Spectre" (2015). He also is known for dark re-inventions of the stage musicals "Cabaret" (1994), "Oliver!" (1994), "Company" (1995), and "" (2003). He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (2013). In 2000 Mendes was appointed
Lothar Mendes work at Gaumont-British Pictures, directing films with Sir Michael Balcon producing. Under that banner, he directed "Jew Süss" (1934) starring one of Germany's most famous emigre actors, Conrad Veidt. Mendes' "Jew Suss" is not to be confused with the later Nazi film of the same title (1940) which is a Reich-made, virulently anti-Semitic film that deliberately contorted the exiled German-Jewish writer, Lion Feuchtwanger's original novel of the same name, on which Mendes' film was based. Mendes' 1934 film version of Feuchtwanger's novel received strong notices at the time, and was considered an important and early film in exposing the origins