Nick Parker biography
Date of birth : 1958-12-06
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Preston, England
Nationality : English
Category : Arts and Entertainment
Last modified : 2011-06-21
Credited as : Animator, creator of Wallace and Gromit, won Oscar
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Nick Park is the stop-motion animator who has won four Oscars for films featuring absent-minded inventor Wallace and his vigilant dog, Gromit.
Park was a student at the National Film and Television School when he met Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman Animations. He joined their studio in 1985 and worked on TV commercials while polishing A Grand Day Out, his first short film with Wallace and Gromit.
Shown in 1990 on BBC, the film became an international hit and was nominated for an Oscar the next year. It lost to another short film by Park, Creature Comforts (1989), but since then Park has picked up Oscars for the Wallace & Gromit short films The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), and for the feature Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). Aardman Animations, with Lord and Park at the helm, also made the animated feature Chicken Run, a box office smash that had the voice talents of Mel Gibson and Imelda Staunton. Park's other work includes a 2003 series that extended the idea behind Creature Comforts (man-on-the-street interviews synched with stop-motion animation), and Shaun the Sheep, a BBC series that started in 2007.
Wallace is voiced by actor Peter Sallis; Gromit is mute... Park's writing partner for The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was veteran TV scripter Bob Baker.
