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Andrew Birkin was born in London in December 1945, the son of naval commander David Birkin and the actress Judy Campbell, and is the brother of actress Jane Birkin. At the age of 16 he left school to work as a messenger at 20th Century Fox’s London office. He began work as a production runner on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1965, but soon became a location scout. By the summer of 1966 Kubrick had promoted him to Assistant Director on Special Effects; later he shot the second unit psychedelic sequences over Scotland, and in 1967 supervised the shooting of the Dawn of Man front projection plates in the Namib Desert. In1968, Kubrick again engaged him as assistant director on his unmade epic of Napoleon.

After a brief stint working for the Beatles, Birkin began writing scripts for both film and television, including The Pied Piper (1970) for Jacques Demy, Flame (1972) for the rock band Slade ( which won the Mojo Vision Award in 2007!), and Inside the Third Reich (1973) which involved a year’s collaboration with Albert Speer. Having worked on an adaptation of Peter Pan for NBC in 1975, Birkin conceived The Lost Boys (1978), a trilogy of films for the BBC about Peter Pan’s creator J M Barrie, which won him awards from the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain and the Royal Television Society. In 1980, Birkin won a BAFTA award and an Oscar nomination for his short film Sredni Vashtar, which he also produced and directed. In 1984 he wrote the shooting script for The Name of the Rose, and in 1988 wrote and directed Burning Secret, which won two awards at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, as well as the Young Jury prize for Best Film at the Brussels Film Festival. In 1993, Birkin wrote and directed The Cement Garden, for which he was awarded the Silver Bear as best director at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1998 he collaborated with Luc Besson on the script of The Messenger: Joan of Arc, and in 2004 wrote the screenplay for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Andrew Birkin is considered to be the world’s expert on J M Barrie, having written the definitive biography J M Barrie & the Lost Boys (Yale University Press) in 1978, which has remained in print for 30 years. He has 3 sons: David, an artist; Anno, a poet and musician who was killed in 2001 aged 20; and Ned, with whom he is currently working on a script about America’s entry into World War One. He lives in Wales with his artist wife Karen.