Matthew Vaughn

Matthew Vaughn
Vaughn in 2019
Born	(1971-03-07) 7 March 1971 (age 50) London, England
Occupation	Director producer screenwriter
Years active	1996–present
Spouse(s)	Claudia Schiffer ​ (m. 2002)​
Children	3

Matthew Allard Robert Vaughn (born 7 March 1971) is an English film director, producer and screenwriter.^[1] He has produced films including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), and directed Layer Cake (2004), Stardust (2007), Kick-Ass (2010), X-Men: First Class (2011), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and its sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), and produced, wrote and directed its prequel The King's Man (2021).

Early life[]

Vaughn was born in Paddington, London, England.^[2] Until 2002, he had thought that he was the child of a relationship between his mother, Kathy Ceaton (died 20 July 2013), and American actor Robert Vaughn.^[3] A paternity investigation^[2] in the 1980s revealed that Robert Vaughn was not his father, but Ceaton never revealed otherwise to Vaughn. Upon asking his mother about his true paternity, she revealed that his father was George Albert Harley de Vere Drummond,^[3][4] 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.^[3]

Vaughn was educated at Sussex House School in London and then 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 low-budget thriller, The Innocent Sleep (1996), starring Annabella Sciorra and Michael Gambon.^[5] 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 (2006), but he dropped out only two weeks before filming began. Subsequently, he was very critical of Brett Ratner's direction of the film. For his next project he co-wrote and directed Stardust, followed by a movie adaptation of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass in 2010. Vaughn directed and co-wrote the first film in the prequel trilogy of the X-Men film universe titled, X-Men: First Class (2011).^[6] Vaughn was signed to return to the series as director of the sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), but dropped out in favour of Bryan Singer who had directed the first two films in the original trilogy, X-Men and X2: X-Men United. Vaughn remained attached to the film by co-writing the script.^[7]

Vaughn's next directorial project, was Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), an adaptation of Mark Millar and David Gibbons's comic book The Secret Service. The film was scripted by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, and produced by Vaughn's production company Marv Films.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]} Vaughn returned to direct, produce, and co-write the Kingsman sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which was released in theaters in September 2017. Vaughn also directed and provided the story for The King's Man, the third installment in the franchise serving as a prequel to the original film. Delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the film is scheduled to be released on December 22, 2021.

In March 2017, Collider reported that Vaughn was top choice to direct Man of Steel 2;^[14] in September of that year, Vaughn confirmed that he was in negotiations with the studio to helm the project.^[15] By March 2019, Vaughn stated that discussions with Warner Bros. had ended, and he was no longer involved with development of the film.^[16]

Personal life[]

On 25 May 2002, Vaughn married German model Claudia Schiffer in Suffolk.^[17] 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).^[18][19] The couple have homes in Notting Hill, London, Northamptonshire and Coldham Hall, Stanningfield, Suffolk.^[20]

Filmography[]

Film[]

Producer only

Television[]

Video game[]

Frequent collaborators[]

Actors and actresses

Work Actor
	Layer Cake	Stardust	Kick-Ass	X-Men: First Class	Kingsman: The Secret Service	Kingsman: The Golden Circle	The King's Man
Randall Batinkoff			Y	Y
Geoff Bell		Y			Y
Sophie Cookson					Y	Y
Taron Egerton					Y	Y
Colin Firth					Y	Y
Jason Flemyng	Y	Y	Y	Y
Dexter Fletcher	Y	Y	Y
Michael Gambon	Y					Y
Tamer Hassan	Y		Y
Edward Holcroft					Y	Y
Aaron Taylor-Johnson			Y				Y
Corey Johnson			Y	Y	Y
Sienna Miller	Y	Y
Mark Strong		Y	Y		Y	Y
Samantha Womack					Y	Y

Film crew

Work Crew
	Layer Cake	Stardust	Kick-Ass	X-Men: First Class	Kingsman: The Secret Service	Kingsman: The Golden Circle	The King's Man
Ben Davis	Y	Y	Y				Y
Jane Goldman		Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Eddie Hamilton			Y	Y	Y	Y
Jon Harris	Y	Y	Y		Y		Y
Henry Jackman			Y	Y	Y	Y
Take That		Y		Y	Y

References[]

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Matthew Vaughn.

• Matthew Vaughn at IMDb
• Marv Films at IMDb
• Interview, Superherohype.com; accessed 28 February 2015