Matthew Vaughn

Matthew Vaughn
Vaughn in March 2010
Born	Matthew Allard Robert Vaughn (1971-03-07) 7 March 1971 London, England, United Kingdom
Citizenship	British
Occupation	Producer, director, screenwriter
Years active	1995–present
Spouse(s)	Claudia Schiffer (m. 2002)
Children	3

Matthew Allard de Vere Drummond^[1] (born Matthew Allard Robert Vaughn; 7 March 1971) is an English film producer, director, and screenwriter.^[2] He is best known for producing such films as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) and directing the films Layer Cake (2004), Stardust (2007), Kick-Ass (2010), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015).

Early life

Vaughn was born in London. He had thought that he was the child of an affair between his mother, Kathy Ceaton (died 20 July 2013), and American actor Robert Vaughn. A paternity investigation^[3] subsequently identified his father as George Albert Harley de Vere Drummond,^[4][5] an English aristocrat who is a godson of King George VI.

Early in Vaughn's life, before the paternity investigation, Robert Vaughn asked for the child's surname to be Vaughn, and it continues today as Vaughn's professional name, though he now uses de Vere Drummond in his personal life.^[6]

Vaughn was educated at Stowe School in Buckingham. Taking a gap year between Stowe and university, he travelled around the world on a Hard Rock Cafe tour. After arriving in Los Angeles he began working as an assistant to a film director. He later returned to London, and attended University College London studying anthropology and ancient history. He dropped out after a few weeks.

Career

Aged 25, Vaughn produced a little-seen thriller, The Innocent Sleep (1995), starring Annabella Sciorra and Michael Gambon.^[7] He continued as a producer on close friend Guy Ritchie's film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The film was a critical, popular and financial success, earning Vaughn and Ritchie £9 million each. Vaughn would later produce Ritchie's Snatch and Swept Away.

Vaughn made his directorial debut in 2004 with Layer Cake. The film was well received and its success led to Vaughn being tapped to direct X-Men: The Last Stand but he dropped out only two weeks before filming began, and was subsequently very critical of Brett Ratner's direction of X-Men 3. He next co-wrote and directed Stardust and a movie adaptation of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass.

In May 2010, 20th Century Fox confirmed that Vaughn would direct and co-write X-Men: First Class. The film was released on 1 June 2011.^[8] Vaughn was signed to direct the sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past, but dropped out in favour of Bryan Singer, the director of the first two films of the X-Men series, X-Men and X-Men 2; Vaughn still stayed on to help write the script.^[9]

Vaughn's next directorial project, confirmed by 20th Century Fox in March 2013, was Kingsman: The Secret Service, an adaptation of Mark Millar and David Gibbons's comic book The Secret Service, scripted by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, and produced by Vaughn's Marv Films. The film was released on 13 February 2015.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]} He also produced Fantastic Four (2015).

Vaughn is currently in talks to direct a new version of Flash Gordon.

Personal life

On 25 May 2002, Vaughn married German supermodel Claudia Schiffer in Suffolk.^[16] The couple have three children: son Caspar Matthew de Vere (born 30 January 2003) and daughters Clementine Poppy (born 11 November 2004) and Cosima Violet (born 14 May 2010).^[17][18] The couple have homes in Notting Hill,^[19] and own Coldham Hall, Stanningfield, Suffolk.^[20]

Filmography

Film

Television

Video game

Frequent collaborators

Collaborator	Layer Cake (2004)	Stardust (2007)	Kick-Ass (2010)	X-Men: First Class (2011)	Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Jane Goldman		Y	Y	Y	Y
Kris Thykier	Y	Y	Y
Jason Flemyng	Y	Y	Y	Y
Dexter Fletcher	Y	Y	Y
Mark Strong		Y	Y		Y
Take That		Y		Y	Y
Corey Johnson			Y	Y	Y
Geoff Bell		Y			Y
Henry Jackman			Y	Y	Y

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Matthew Vaughn.

• Matthew Vaughn at the Internet Movie Database
• Marv Films at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview, Superherohype.com; accessed 28 February 2015