English film and theatre director who was known for his innovative treatments of classic stage productions as well as for his thought-provoking films.

Mendes was raised in London by his mother, a writer of children's fiction; she and his father, a university professor, had divorced when Mendes was five. He attended the University of Cambridge, where he formed a theatre company with playwright Tim Firth. After graduating in 1987 with first-class honours in English, he accepted a job at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, Eng. When the director of a production of the Dion Boucicault (Boucicault, Dion) comedy London Assurance walked out, Mendes was summoned to take over. The play was a success and moved to London's West End, where Mendes quickly made a name for himself, directing Dame Judi Dench (Dench, Dame Judi) in Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton)'s The Cherry Orchard. Stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre followed.

In 1992 Mendes took over as artistic director of the nonprofit Donmar Warehouse Theatre in London. His reputation, solidified by a series of well-received productions, began to attract renowned actors to the unprepossessing venue. Celebrated stagings of Cabaret (1993) and Tennessee Williams (Williams, Tennessee)'s The Glass Menagerie (1995) catapulted Mendes to further fame, and he had similar success in 1998 when he took Cabaret and Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s Othello to New York. In 1998 Mendes directed film star Nicole Kidman (Kidman, Nicole)'s London stage debut in a provocative rendition of David Hare (Hare, Sir David)'s The Blue Room.

Mendes's productions of Oliver! and Cabaret brought him to the attention of film director Steven Spielberg (Spielberg, Steven), who gave Mendes the script for American Beauty (1999). The film, which starred Kevin Spacey (Spacey, Kevin) and Annette Bening, attempts to expose the seamy underbelly of life in modern American suburbia. Mendes won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best director for his work on the satire, which was also awarded the Academy Award for best picture.

Mendes proceeded to form his own production company with financial backing from Spielberg's DreamWorks studio. In 2002 he alternated between theatre and film work, directing stage productions of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse in addition to helming the gangster movie Road to Perdition. His production of Gypsy (2003), staged at the Shubert Theatre in New York and starring Bernadette Peters, was widely acclaimed. He released the film Jarhead, a Gulf War drama, in 2005. Mendes's next project was an adaptation of the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road (2008) starring actress Kate Winslet (Winslet, Kate), whom he had married in 2003. The film centres on a free-spirited married couple, played by Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (DiCaprio, Leonardo), as they navigate the increasingly homogeneous social milieu of 1950s American suburbia. In 2000 Mendes was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (British Empire, The Most Excellent Order of the) for his contributions to drama.