Early life

Park was born in Brookfield Park in Preston, Lancashire in the north-west of England to Mary Cecilia Ashton (born 1930), a seamstress, and Roger Wulstan Park (1925-2004), an architectural photographer. The middle child of five siblings, Park grew up on Greenlands Estate; the family later moved to Walmer Bridge, where his mother still resides. His sister Janet lives in Longton. He attended Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady's Catholic High School).

He grew up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year-old made films with the help of his mother and her home movie camera and cotton bobbins. He also took after his father, an amateur inventor, and would send homemade items like a bottle that squeezed out different coloured wools in to Blue Peter.

He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) and then went to the National Film and Television School, where he started making the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out.

Career

In 1985, he joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial products (including the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", where he worked on the dance scene involving oven-ready chickens). He also had a part in animating the Pee-wee's Playhouse which featured Paul Reubens. Along with all this, he had finally completed A Grand Day Out, and with that in post-production, he made Creature Comforts as his contribution to a series of shorts called "Lip Synch". Creature Comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. The two films were nominated for a host of awards. A Grand Day Out beat Creature Comforts for the BAFTA award, but it was Creature Comforts that won Park his first Oscar.

In 1990 Park worked alongside advertising agency GGK to develop a series of highly acclaimed television advertisements for the "Heat Electric" campaign. The Creature Comforts advertisements are now regarded as among the best advertisements ever shown on British television, as voted (independently) by viewers of the UK's main commercial channels ITV and Channel 4.

Two more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), followed, both winning Oscars. He then made his first feature-length film, Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Aardman founder Peter Lord. He also supervised a new series of "Creature Comforts" films for British television in 2003.

His second theatrical feature-length film and first Wallace and Gromit feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released on 5 October 2005, and won Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 78th Academy Awards, 6 March 2006.

On 10 October 2005, a fire gutted Aardman Animations' archive warehouse. The fire resulted in the loss of most of Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the movie Chicken Run. Some of the original Wallace & Gromit models and sets, as well as the master prints of the finished films, were elsewhere and survived.

Park's most recent work includes a U.S. version of Creature Comforts, a weekly television series that was on CBS every Monday evening at 8 pm ET. In the series, Americans were interviewed about a range of subjects. The interviews were lip synced to Aardman animal characters.

In September 2007, it was announced that Nick Park had been commissioned to design a bronze statue of Wallace and Gromit, which will be placed in his home town of Preston. In October 2007 it was announced that the BBC had commissioned another Wallace & Gromit short film to be entitled Trouble at Mill (retitled later to A Matter of Loaf and Death).

Nick Park studied at Preston College, which has since named its library for the art and design department after him: the Nick Park Library Learning Centre. He is the recipient of a gold Blue Peter badge.

By the beginning of 2010, Park had won 4 Academy Awards and had the distinction of having won an Oscar every time he had been nominated (his only loss being when he was nominated twice in the same category). This streak ended in the 2010 Oscars when Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death failed to win the best animated short Oscar.

Park had his first acting role in February 2011, voicing himself in a cameo on The Simpsons episode "Angry Dad: The Movie". The fictional Park's new Willis and Crumble short, Better Gnomes and Gardens, is a send-up of Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, with animations produced by the Chiodo Bros. Lisa Simpson has the following short exchange with Park:

Lisa: Good luck, Mr. Park. There'd be no shame in losing to you.

Park: Oh, that's very sweet of you. Thank you for saying so.

Lisa: Agh!

Park: No worries. I'll just stick 'em back on. I'm more clay than man now.

In late 2011, Park directed a music video for 'Plain Song'- a song by Native and the Name, a Sheffield band led by Joe Rose, the son of an old university friend. The video was filmed at Birkdale School, Sheffield, and Park also selected the track as one of his Desert Island Discs when he went on the show in 2011, which led to suggestions that Park was using his fame to give a friend a leg-up in his career. Park denied these claims insisting it had become one of his favourite songs. The song and video can be found on YouTube.

In 2013, Park was involved in the British stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, Princess Mononoke.

He was the executive producer of Shaun the Sheep Movie and he also voiced himself in a cameo.

For 2018, he is directing another Aardman Animation's stop-motion film, titled Early Man. Set in the time of dinosaurs and mammoths, it will tell a story of a caveman who unites his tribesmen against a mighty enemy, while unintentionally inventing football.

Personal life

Park has never married nor has children. The Daily Telegraph remarked Park has taken on some attributes of Wallace, just "as dog-owners come to look like their pets", overexpressing himself, possibly as a result of having to show animators how he wants his characters to behave.

He is a fan of The Beano comic, and guest-edited the 70th anniversary issue dated 2 August 2008. He also contributed to Classics from the Comics at the same time, picking his favourite classic stories for the comic reprint magazine's new Classic Choice feature.

His film-making ideas were encouraged by his old English teacher; however Park has denied that the character of Wallace was based on him.

Filmography

Film

Year	Title	Director	Producer	Writer	Animator	Notes
1989	Creature Comforts	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Short film
1989	Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
1993	Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
1995	Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
2000	Chicken Run	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Co-directed with Peter Lord
2005	Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Co-directed with Steve Box
2008	Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Short film
2015	Shaun the Sheep Movie	No	Yes	No	No	Executive producer, creator and voice of himself
2015	Shaun the Sheep: The Farmer's Llamas	No	Yes	No	No	Short film; Executive producer
2018	Early Man	Yes	TBA	TBA	TBA

Television

Year	Title	Notes
2003-2006	Creature Comforts	Creator Executive producer
2007-present	Shaun the Sheep
2009-2012	Timmy Time	Executive producer
2010	Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention
2011	The Simpsons	Cameo voice role as himself in episode Angry Dad: The Movie

Awards and nominations

Year	Nominated For	Award	Category	Result
1990	Creature Comforts	BAFTA	Best Animated Film	Nominated
	Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out	BAFTA	Best Animated Film	Won
1991	Creature Comforts	Oscar	Best Animated Short Film	Won
	Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out	Oscar	Best Animated Short Film	Nominated
1994	Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers	BAFTA	Best Animated Film	Won
	Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers	Oscar	Best Animated Short Film	Won
1996	Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave	BAFTA	Best Animated Film	Won
	Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave	Oscar	Best Animated Short Film	Won
2001	Chicken Run	BAFTA	Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film	Nominated
2004	Creature Comforts	BAFTA	Comedy Programme or Series Award	Nominated
2005	Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit	Oscar	Best Animated Feature	Won
2006	Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit	BAFTA	Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film	Won
2008	Creature Comforts	Emmy Award	Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour)	Nominated
2009	Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death	BAFTA	Best Short Animation	Won
2010	Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death	Oscar	Best Animated Short Film	Nominated

[ Source: Wikipedia ]