Sam Mendes representative announced on 15 March 2010 that "they separated earlier this year". The couple were divorced in 2011. Mendes married trumpeter Alison Balsom in January 2017, their daughter Phoebe Mendes was born in September 2017. 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
James Bond in film February 1962; five days later filming began at Pinewood Studios in England with sets designed by Ken Adam, who had previously worked with Broccoli on the 1960 film "The Trials of Oscar Wilde". Maurice Binder created the title sequence and introduced the gun barrel motif that appears in all the Eon Bond films. Monty Norman wrote the accompanying soundtrack, which included the "James Bond Theme", heard in the gun barrel sequence and in a calypso medley over the title credits; the theme was described by another Bond film composer, David Arnold, as "bebop-swing vibe coupled with that vicious, dark, distorted