Tony Scott

Tony Scott was born at North Shields in 1944. His first contact with cinema was as a performer: he took the lead in Boy and Bicycle, the first directing job of his elder brother Ridley. He became known for fast-paced, big-budget action films, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II among them. He had made advertisements for the army, and Top Gun worked like a superb recruitment film; one performer recounts two air force cadets who had enlisted under the film's influence threatening him in a bar. He was devoted, in his own words, to real toys, and his films are full of machines, guns, jets, submarines and trains. Sixteen features came in all, the last of them Unstoppable, with Denzel Washington.