BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: John Michael Crichton
Description: Author, film producer, film director, screenwriter, television producer
Known For: ER, Jurassic Park, and Disclosure
Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Date Born: 23rd October 1942
Location Born: Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Date Died: 4th November 2008
Location Died: Los Angeles
Cause Of Death: Throat Cancer
CONTACT DETAILS
Web Site:
Other Links: See below:
YOUTUBE VIDEO
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Michael Crichton
An American best-selling author, producer, director, and screenwriter, best known for his work in the science fiction, medical fiction, and thriller genres.
Pen name – John Lange – Jeffery Hudson – Michael Douglas
His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and many have been adapted into films. In 1994 Crichton became the only creative artist ever to have works simultaneously charting at No. 1 in television, film, and book sales (with ER, Jurassic Park, and Disclosure, respectively).
His literary works are usually based on the action genre and heavily feature technology. His novels epitomize the techno-thriller genre of literature, often exploring technology and failures of human interaction with it, especially resulting in catastrophes with biotechnology.
Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background. He was the author of, among others, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo, Travels, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, Airframe, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next (the final book published before his death), Pirate Latitudes (published November 24, 2009), and a final unfinished techno-thriller, Micro, which was published in November 2011.
John Michael Crichton (which, according to the author, “rhymes with frighten” was born in Chicago, Illinois,to John Henderson Crichton, a journalist, and Zula Miller Crichton, on October 23, 1942.
He was raised on Long Island, in Roslyn, New York, and had three siblings: two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a younger brother, Douglas.[citation needed] Crichton showed a keen interest in writing from a young age and at the age of 14 had a column related to travel published in The New York Times. Crichton had always planned on becoming a writer and began his studies at Harvard College in 1960. During his undergraduate study in literature, he conducted an experiment to expose a professor whom he believed to be giving him abnormally low marks and criticizing his literary style.
Informing another professor of his suspicions, Crichton plagiarized a work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. The paper was returned by his unwitting professor with a mark of “B−”.
His issues with the English department led Crichton to switch his concentration to biological anthropology as an undergraduate, obtaining his A.B. summa cum laude in 1964.
He was also initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellow[citation needed] from 1964 to 1965 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1965.
Crichton later enrolled at Harvard Medical School, when he began publishing work. By this time he had become exceptionally tall. By his own account, he was approximately 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m) tall in 1997. In reference to his height, while in medical school, he began writing novels under the pen names “John Lange” and “Jeffrey Hudson”(“Lange” is a surname in Germany, meaning “long”, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous 17th-century dwarf in the court of Queen Consort Henrietta Maria of England).
In Travels, he recalls overhearing doctors who were unaware that he was the author, discussing the flaws in his book The Andromeda Strain. A Case of Need, written under the Hudson pseudonym, won him his first Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1969.
He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas under the shared pen name “Michael Douglas”.[citation needed] The back cover of that book carried a picture, taken by their mother, of Michael and Douglas when very young.
During his clinical rotations at the Boston City Hospital, Crichton grew disenchanted with the culture there, which appeared to emphasize the interests and reputations of doctors over the interests of patients. Crichton graduated from Harvard, obtaining an M.D. in 1969,and undertook a post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, from 1969 to 1970. He never obtained a license to practice medicine, devoting himself to his writing career instead.
Reflecting on his career in medicine years later, Crichton concluded that patients too often shunned responsibility for their own health, relying on doctors as miracle workers rather than advisors. He experimented with astral projection, aura viewing, and clairvoyance, coming to believe that these included real phenomena that scientists had too eagerly dismissed as paranormal.
In 1988, Crichton was a visiting writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fiction
Odds On was Michael Crichton’s first published novel. It was published in 1966, under the pseudonym of John Lange. It is a 215-page paperback novel which describes an attempted robbery in an isolated hotel on Costa Brava.
In September 2004, the Sci Fi Channel would announce a production of a miniseries, executive-produced by Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Frank Darabont, premiering on May 26, 2008. Crichton’s third novel of 1969, The Venom Business relates the story of a smuggler who uses his exceptional skill as a snake handler to his advantage by importing snakes to be used by drug companies and universities for medical research.
In 1975, Crichton ventured into the nineteenth century with his historical novel The Great Train Robbery, which would become a bestseller. The novel is a recreation of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, a massive gold heist, which takes place on a train traveling through Victorian era England. A considerable proportion of the book was set in London. The novel was later made into a 1979 film directed by Crichton himself, starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.
In 1980, Crichton published the novel Congo, which centers on an expedition searching for diamonds in the tropical rain forest of Congo. They discover the legendary lost city of Zinj and an unusual race of barbarous gorillas. The novel was loosely adapted into a 1995 film, starring Laura Linney, Tim Curry, and Ernie Hudson.
In 1990, Crichton published the novel Jurassic Park. Crichton utilized the presentation of “fiction as fact”, used in his previous novels, Eaters of the Dead and The Andromeda Strain. In addition, chaos theory and its philosophical implications are used to explain the collapse of an amusement park in a “biological preserve” on Isla Nublar, an island west of Costa Rica. Paleontologist Alan Grant and his paleobotanist graduate student, Ellie Sattler, are brought in by billionaire John Hammond to investigate. The park is revealed to contain genetically recreated dinosaur species, including Dilophosaurus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus rex, among others. They have been recreated using damaged dinosaur DNA, found in mosquitoes that sucked Saurian blood and were then trapped and preserved in amber.
Aside from fiction, Crichton wrote several other books based on medical or scientific themes, often based upon his own observations in his field of expertise. In 1970, he published Five Patients, a book which recounts his experiences of hospital practices in the late 1960s at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
Crichton wrote or directed several motion pictures and episodes of TV series. In the 1970s in particular he was intent on being a successful filmmaker. Crichton wrote several episodes for the television series Insight in the early 1970s. His first film, Pursuit (1972), was a TV movie both written and directed by Crichton that is based on his novel Binary.
Westworld was the first feature film that used 2D computer-generated imagery (CGI).
Crichton directed the film Coma, adapted from a Robin Cook novel. There are other similarities in terms of genre and the fact that both Cook and Crichton had medical degrees, were of similar age, and wrote about similar subjects.
Other major releases directed by Crichton include The Great Train Robbery (1979), Looker (1981), Runaway (1984), and Physical Evidence (1989). The middle two films were science fiction, set in the very near future at the time, and included particularly flashy styles of filmmaking, for their time.
He wrote the screenplay for the movies Extreme Close Up (1973) and Twister (1996), the latter co-written with Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time. While Jurassic Park and The Lost World were both based on Crichton’s novels, Jurassic Park III was not (though scenes from the Jurassic Park novel were incorporated into the third film, such as the aviary).
Crichton was also the creator and executive producer of the television drama ER. He had written what became the pilot script in 1974. Twenty years later Steven Spielberg helped develop the show, serving as a producer on season one and offering advice (he insisted on Julianna Margulies becoming a regular, for example). It was also through Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment that John Wells was contacted to be the show’s executive producer. In 1994, Crichton achieved the unique distinction of having a No. 1 movie, Jurassic Parka No. 1 TV show, ER, and a No. 1 book, Disclosure.
Illness and death
In accordance with the private way in which Crichton lived his life, his throat cancer was not made public until his death. According to Crichton’s brother Douglas, Crichton was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 2008.
He was undergoing chemotherapy treatment at the time of his death, and Crichton’s physicians and family members had been expecting him to make a recovery. He unexpectedly died of the disease on November 4, 2008, at the age of 66.
Further information can be obtained at the web sites listed on the Links button above
WORKS
Anthologies:
McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003)
Novels:
•Andromeda Strain, the (1969)
•Terminal Man, the (1972)
•Great Train Robbery, the (1975)
•Eaters of the Dead (1976)
•Congo (1980)
•Sphere (1987)
•Jurassic Park (1990)
•Rising Sun (1992)
•Disclosure (1994)
•Lost World, the (1995)
•Airframe (1996)
•Timeline (1999)
•Prey (2002)
•State of Fear (2004)
•Next (2006)
Series:•Jurassic Park
Pseudonyms:•Jeffery Hudson
•John Lange
Awards
Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, Best Novel, 1969 — A Case of Need
Association of American Medical Writers Award, 1970
Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, Best Motion Picture, 1980 — The Great Train Robbery
Named to the list of the “Fifty Most Beautiful People” by People magazine, 1992
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award, 1994
Writers Guild of America Award, Best Long Form Television Script of 1995
George Foster Peabody Award, 1994 — ER
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, 1996 — ER
Ankylosaur named Crichtonsaurus bohlini, 2002
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award, 2006