JON AVNET

Jon Avnet, born November 17, 1949, has directed, written and produced more than 80 motion pictures, television movies, series and Broadway plays, winning Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards. The Great Neck North 1967 grad is best known for cowriting, directing and producing Fried Green Tomatoes. He produced both Risky Business, which launched Tom Cruise’s career, and The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, which told the true story of a woman in a highly abusive relationship. The film is credited with creating the battered woman syndrome as a legal defense for victims of domestic violence. In 2001, he directed, cowrote and produced Uprising, which he and his coauthor researched for five years to tell the story of the armed resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. He interviewed more than 200 survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Germany, Israel and the United States, and studied these historical events with leaders from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; Yad Vashem; the Ghetto Fighters House and Yivo, which led to him lecturing on resistance during the Holocaust at universities around the world.