Tony Palmer is an award-winning British film director and author. His work includes over 100 films, ranging from early works with The Beatles, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa (200 Motels), to his famous classical portraits which include profiles of Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn, John Osborne, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner, Yehudi Menuhin, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He is also an acclaimed stage director of theatre and opera.

Among over 40 international prizes for his work are 12 Gold Medals from the New York Film Festival as well as numerous BAFTAs and Emmy Awards. Tony Palmer is the only person to have won the Prix Italia twice. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and an honorary citizen of both New Orleans and Athens.

From Cambridge University (where he was also President of the Marlowe Society), he joined the BBC. Following an apprenticeship with Ken Russell and Jonathan Miller, Palmer's first major film, Benjamin Britten & his Festival, became the first BBC film to be networked in the U.S.A. With his second film, All My Loving, an examination of rock 'n' roll & politics in the late 1960s, he achieved considerable notoriety overnight.