Jan Sharp

Jan Sharp was educated in convent boarding schools and studied Fine Arts at Melbourne University in Australia, a campus that had just fallen in love with the Cinema of the French New Wave. She progressed immediately to a director's apprenticeship at Film Australia, a hands-on training in all aspects of filmmaking, she was the first female intake in a male club. From this she joined TV Features at Australian Broadcasting Commission, part of a team making Chequerboard, for five years the top rating documentary series in Australia. After the birth of her first daughter, she returned to Film Australia as Associate Producer and Director of two series of documentaries on the problems of Adolescence. The first series won the AFI Documentary Award in 1984, the second won the same award the following year. She worked concurrently in print and radio; A weekly Saturday column called The Showbiz Column in Murdoch's national paper the Australian, cultural programs for Radio Australia, radio magazine pieces for the ABC Science Unit. She left FA to work with her husband Phillip Noyce on his first feature Newsfront, then returned to Film Australia as a Producer. The second woman in what had been a middle aged male enclave. In 1986 she produced her first feature film, The Good Wife, which was released worldwide by Atlantic Releasing and has been in constant distribution ever since. Echoes of Paradise followed, which was also released worldwide and in current release. In 1995 she wrote and produced and was the 2nd Unit Director of Wide Sargasso Sea for New Line Cinema. The film has also been in constant release and is currently being studied in college film courses in the US and Australia as a fine example of a screen adaptation of a classic novel. The Good Wife and Wide Sargasso Sea are both being released on DVD this year in Australia and Pacific Territories by Village Roadshow. They are already available on DVD in the US and Europe. The last couple of years she has been working on video documentaries. On one Gavin Lambert for Facets, another an inquiry into the nature of the Celebrity Culture, and then Damage Control, a video diary of her journey through a recurrence of Cancer. Her feature films were on hold during her recent cancer, but are now moving towards production. River's Children, set on the Murray River in Australia will be directed later this year (2009) by John Irvin and Shanghai Story next year in Shanghai by Sherwood Hu. She is writer/producer of all her films except for The Good Wife.