Rachel Talalay

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Rachel Talalay (born 16 August 1958) is a British-American film and television director and producer. She is also a University of British Columbia film professor.^[1]

Early life and education[]

Talalay was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father Paul Talalay was a pharmacologist, born in Berlin to a Russian Jewish family, and her mother Pamela is an English biochemist. She has two sisters and a brother.^[2] She was raised mostly in Baltimore, Maryland, with two years of her childhood in Britain.^[1] Talalay attended Yale, where she majored in mathematics, graduating in 1980.^[3][4] She also ran the Yale Film Society.^[3]

Career[]

Talalay has worked in a number of different capacities in filmmaking before making her directorial debut with the film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).^[5] Talalay also worked on the first four A Nightmare on Elm Street films.^[3] Her work with the earlier Nightmare films utilized her computer skills and finding ways to create better special effects while still keeping costs low.^[3] Despite her familiarity with the Freddy movies, when she directed Freddy's Dead, she was given internal memos telling her not to be "too girly" or "too sensitive."^[6]

Talalay also directed Tank Girl in 1995, and was looking into re-optioning the rights to make a new film in 2008.^[7] As a film producer, Talalay worked with director John Waters on the films Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990). She was also a production assistant on Waters' 1981 film Polyester.^[8]

Talalay states that ever since Doctor Who was revived in 2005, she wanted to work on the show.^[9] Talalay directed all three of Peter Capaldi's series finales: series 8's "Dark Water" and "Death in Heaven",^[10] series 9's "Heaven Sent" and "Hell Bent"—the former considered by many to be one of the best episodes in the show's 57-year history^[11]— and series 10's "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls",^[12] as well as the Doctor Who 2017 Christmas special, "Twice Upon a Time".^[13] In 2019, she directed a film adaption of Joe Ballarini's A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting for Netflix.^[14]

Personal life[]

Talalay met British film producer Rupert Harvey while working on Android in 1982. They began a relationship soon after, and were married in 1990, with John Waters officiating the wedding.^[4][15]

Filmography[]

Films[]

As director

• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) (also story writer)
• Ghost in the Machine (1993)
• Tank Girl (1995)
• A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting (2020)

As producer

• Hairspray (1988)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
• Cry-Baby (1990)
• The Borrowers (1997)

Television[]

References[]

External links[]

• Rachel Talalay at IMDb