The Crying Game

Neil Jordan's The Crying Game won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 65th Academy Awards in 1993 and had five further nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Stephen Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Jaye Davidson) and Best Film Editing. Jordan would win a BAFTA for his adapted screenplay of The End of the Affair seven years on, but The Crying Game was the film that made him a major international writer-director.

Channel 4 (Film4) and Palace Pictures financed it for £2 million, and it very nearly missed American cinemas altogether. Miramax picked it up in mid-1992 after a quiet European release and built one of the year's most calculated marketing campaigns around its central twist, with Harvey Weinstein personally asking critics not to give away the plot. The result was a $62 million U.S. theatrical gross, more than thirty times the production budget, and the campaign is still taught in film-marketing courses as a model of how to manage word of mouth.

Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson and Adrian Dunbar lead the cast, alongside Jaye Davidson in a breakthrough performance. Davidson had never acted before and was cast after a chance meeting at a London party with one of the production's casting consultants; he made only one more feature (Stargate, 1994) and has not worked in film since. Boy George's cover of the title song reached the top twenty in the UK chart, and the soundtrack album was a significant commercial success.