1. Stephen Poliakoff's father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and his mother was a British Jew.
15 Facts About Stephen Poliakoff
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Stephen Poliakoff then attended Westminster School, where he attracted sufficient attention for Granny, a play he wrote and directed, to be reviewed in The Times newspaper.
3.
Stephen Poliakoff was still at Westminister when Michael Rudman commissioned Poliakoff's first professionally produced play, "A Day With my Sister," which premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh directed by David Halliwell in 1971.
4.
Poliakoff continued to write stage plays, becoming writer-in-residence for the National Theatre at the age of 24, but he became increasingly interested in the medium of television, with Stronger Than the Sun, Bloody Kids directed by Stephen Frears, Caught on a Train starring Peggy Ashcroft, and Soft Targets.
5.
In 1976, Stephen Poliakoff won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award for Hitting Town and City Sugar and in 1997 he won the Critic's Circle Best Play Award for the National Theatre production of Blinded By The Sun.
6.
Stephen Poliakoff subsequently returned to his favoured form, television, this time choosing a flexible serial format resulting in the acclaimed and Prix Italia-winning Shooting the Past, the fresh critical and audience success of Perfect Strangers, a family drama starring Matthew Macfadyen, Michael Gambon and Lindsay Duncan and The Lost Prince, a single drama recognised with an Emmy award rare for a non-American production.
7.
In 2011, Stephen Poliakoff wrote a seven-minute short film, Astonish Me, to celebrate WWF's 50th anniversary.
8.
Stephen Poliakoff wrote and directed Summer of Rockets, a semi-autobiographical six-part series broadcast by the BBC in June 2019.
9.
Stephen Poliakoff was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 2007.
10.
Stephen Poliakoff's brother, Sir Martyn Poliakoff, a research chemist and lecturer, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, being, until November 2016, its Foreign Secretary and vice-president.
11.
Stephen Poliakoff is the presenter of a YouTube educational series on chemistry, The Periodic Table of Videos.
12.
Stephen Poliakoff's paternal grandfather, Joseph, was a Russian Jew who experienced first-hand the effects of the communist revolution in Russia from the family's Moscow flat across from the Kremlin.
13.
Stephen Poliakoff then fled with his family from the Soviet Union to the UK in 1924.
14.
Joseph Stephen Poliakoff was an inventor of electrical devices whose many inventions included a selenium photograph telephony shutter in 1899, which, along with electrical sound amplification, allowed for synchronised audio on film, the radio volume control, a magnetic induction loop that allowed hearing-impaired people to hear in auditoriums or theatres, and the paging beeper.
15.
Stephen Poliakoff founded the Multitone Electric Company of London in 1931 that produced hearing aid devices with their most prestigious customer being Winston Churchill.