Aug 30 2008
Pedro Almodovar
Welcome to the Leading Speakers bureau! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed to get notified every time we post a new speaker profile. Thanks for visiting and hope we can offer you the best speakers to make your event a success!
Director, screenwriter, composer and actor,,
Pedro Almodovar is the most celebrated Spanish diretor since Luis Bunuel andCarlos Saura. He was born in La Mancha, Spain in 1951.
At the age of 16, he moved to Madrid, alone without either his family or any money in his pocket. He had decided to study and make films. It was impossible to enter the Official film School as Franco had recently closed it. He worked in multiple and sporadic jobs but he couldn’t afford to buy his first Super-8 camera until he took a “serious” job with the National Telephone Company where he worked for 12 years as an administrative assistant. These years were in a sense, his real education. He was in touch with a social class which he would probably not have mixed with in other circumstances; the middle class Spanish family at the beginning of the age consumerism. He joined the independent theatre group “Loss Gollardos” and made Super 8 movies. He wrote for several underground magazines and also short stories, some of which were published. His luck was that the opening of his first feature film coinicided with the birth of Spanish democracy in Spain.
Continue Reading »
Comments Off
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, is an icon of the 20th century. Becoming an astronaut in 1962, he was involved in various space program firsts, including commanding the Gemini 8 flight in 1966 when he performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space. Later, as the commander of Apollo 11, he with colleagues Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin, completed the first landing mission to the moon. For his achievement he received the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a US civilian can achieve. 
Frank Maguire is a highly professional business mentor and acknowledged as one of the most outstanding and leading management and communication experts worldwide. As the senior vice president of FedEx he made the organisation one of the most profitable business successes of the last two decades.
Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.org, the free encyclopedia project, and Wikia.com, which extends the social concepts of Wikipedia into new areas. Jimmy was formerly a futures and options trader in Chicago, and currently travels the world evangelizing the success of Wikipedia and the importance of free culture
Sir David Frost is probably the world’s most prominent television interviewer.
Damon Hill OBE is a British former racing driver from England. He was the 1996 Formula One World Champion and is the son of the late double Formula One world champion Graham Hill, and is the only son of a world champion to win the title. He retired from the sport at the end of the 1999 season, after 122 race starts. In 2006, Damon Hill became president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, succeeding Jackie Stewart.
Renée Mauborgne is a key authority on value innovation and wealth creation.
Philip K. Verleger Jr. is the President of PKVerleger LLC and senior advisor to The Brattle Group. He has been associated with the Fred Bergsten Institute since 1986 and is a senior fellow. He has held positions at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Treasury, the Institute for International Economics, Yale University, the University of California, and various firms in the private sector. He is a member of the National Petroleum Council and the Council of Foreign Relations.
Jean-Marie Chevalier is currently professor of Economics at the University of Paris-Dauphine, Director of the ‘Centre de Géopolitique de l’Energie et des Matières Premières’. He is also a Director at CERA. He has worked, as an economist for Elf Aquitaine and the energy department of the World Bank. For several years, he was a member of the board of directors of the Banque Nationale de Paris.
Claudia Kemfert is Head of the department Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and Professor of Energy Economics at Humboldt University, Berlin. She advises EU president José Manuel Barroso as a member of the High Level Group on Energy and she is an external advisor for the World Bank, the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
