**"One of the great, and uncompromising, poets of television” - Sight & Sound
"Tony Palmer…a clear seeing, visionary artist, pursuing with precision and perfection the image which draws him onwards.” - Yehudi Menuhin ** TONY PALMER’s vast filmography of over one hundred films ranges from early works with The Beatles, Cream, Rory Gallagher, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa (200 Motels), to the famous portraits with and about Walton, Britten, Stravinsky, Maria Callas, André Previn, John Osborne, Leonard Cohen (Bird on a Wire), Margot Fonteyn and Menuhin, as well as feature films such as Testimony, starring Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich.
His 7 hour 45 minutes film on Wagner, starring Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Vanessa Redgrave, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the most beautiful films ever made”.
Among over 45 international prizes for his work are 14 Gold Medals at the New York Film & Television Festival (the most recent in 2016), awards from the Jerusalem, San Francisco, São Paolo, Chicago, Sofia, Cuenca, and London Film Festivals, as well as numerous BAFTA (British Academy of Film & Television) EMMY, GRIERSON nominations, and awards. In 1989 the National Film Theatre in London staged a major retrospective of his work at, the first maker of ‘arts’ films to be so fêted. He is also a prize-winning opera director, including the Golden Mask in Moscow, recipient of three Platinum and two Gold Records, and was awarded a SONY Prize as a radio presenter. A D.Mus (Hon), D.Litt (Hon) and FRGS, he is the only person to have won the PRIX ITALIA three times, and in 2014 was nominated for the Glenn Gould International Prize, unprecedented for a documentary filmmaker.
In 2016, he has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture for services to Bulgarian culture and been made honorary Professor of East European Cultural Studies at the Ukrainka National University in Lutsk.
With his family he lives in the most westerly house in England.