Sturridge began his career as an actor. He appeared in Zigger Zagger in 1967 with the National Youth Theatre, while in 1968 he played Markland in Lindsay Anderson's film if.... and portrayed the young Edward VII in Edward the Seventh. Directing episodes of Coronation Street, Strangers, World in Action, Crown Court and The Spoils of War by his late twenties, he gained international recognition for his work on the eleven-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited which won over 17 awards including two Golden Globes and six British Academy awards. Since then the films Sturridge has directed have included Runners, A Handful of Dust, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and , based on the Cottingley Fairies story which won the BAFTA for Best Children's film 1998. In 2009 he wrote and directed a remake of Eric Knight's children's classic Lassie. He also directed the black-and-white segment "La Forza del Destino" from Aria. Other television work includes Soft Targets, A Foreign Field and Gulliver's Travels, which won six Emmys including Best Series and the Royal Television Society's Team award. In 2001 he wrote and directed Longitude, based on Dava Sobell's best selling life of the clockmaker John Harrison which won the BANFF TV Festival Best Series award, two PAWS awards and five BAFTAs. In 2000 he formed Firstsight Films whose first production was an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition, which Sturridge wrote and directed. The serial Shackleton, which starred Kenneth Branagh, was shot on location in the Arctic. It won the BAFTA for Best Series and Best Costume, and the Radio Times Audience award for Best Drama 2002, as well as being nominated for seven Primetime Emmys, winning for music and photography. Sturridge also contributed to Beckett on Film, part of a collaborative effort to film all of Samuel Beckett's plays with Anthony Minghella, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and Neil Jordan and Patricia Rozema. Following Minghella's death in 2009, Sturridge became a director for his final project, the television series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. In 2010 he returned to Manchester and Coronation Street to direct the story of the making of its first episode The Road to Coronation Street. This television film won both the RTS and BAFTA awards for Best Single Drama 2011 and a Gold Medal at the New York Film and TV Festival in Las Vegas. In 2011, Sturridge directed a seven-minute short film, "Astonish Me", written by Stephen Poliakoff to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund. The film was shown in Odeon Cinemas in August 2011 and made available on the WWF website and YouTube. Sturridge's first professional theatre production was a musical version of Charles Dickens'Hard Times which he co-wrote and directed at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry; since then, occasional theatre work includes in 1985 The Seagull with Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson and Jonathan Pryce and Samuel Beckett's Endgame with Kenneth Cranham and Peter Dinklage which opened at Dublin's Gate Theatre on the centenary of Beckett's 100th birthday, and later transferred to the Barbican. He also directed Handel's Tolomeo for Broomhill Opera. In 2007 Sturridge joined the board of the Directors and Producers Rights Society, which, in 2008, widened its responsibilities and changed its name to Directors UK. The DUK currently has over 4000 members and represents the creative and economic rights of UK film and television directors, with Paul Greengrass as President and Sturridge as the elected Chair.
