Jim Sharman
| Jim Sharman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
James David Sharman 12 March 1945 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation | Screenwriter, film/stage director, producer |
James David "Jim" Sharman (born 12 March 1945), the son of boxing tent entrepreneur Jimmy Sharman, is an Australian director and writer for film and stage with more than 70 productions to his credit. He is renowned in Australia for his work as a theatre director from the 1960s to the present, and is best known internationally as the director of the 1973 theatrical hit The Rocky Horror Show, its film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the film's follow-up Shock Treatment (1981).
Sharman was born to James Michael Sharman (1912–2006) and Christina McAndleish Sharman (1914–2003). He was educated in Sydney, though his upbringing included time spent on Australian showgrounds where his father and grandfather ran a travelling sideshow of popular legend: Jimmy Sharman's Boxing Troupe. This brought him into contact with the world of circus and travelling vaudeville. Developing an interest in theatre, he graduated from the production course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney in 1966.
Sharman created a series of ground-breaking productions of experimental theatre, many for the Old Tote Theatre Company, culminating in a controversial staging of Mozart's Don Giovanni for Opera Australia, when he was 21 years old. Over the following decade, he directed three rock musicals that defined their era: Hair in 1969 (Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, Boston) (he also designed the original Sydney production); Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972 (Australia and Palace Theatre, London) and created the original production of The Rocky Horror Show with Richard O'Brien in 1973 (Royal Court Theatre, London – subsequently in Sydney, Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York City). He cowrote the screenplay and directed the international cult hit film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) for Twentieth Century Fox, and directed its loosely based sequel Shock Treatment in 1981. In 1985, he directed third year students at NIDA in the production of A Dream Play.
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