Antonia Bird - Telegraph Born in London on May 27 1951, Antonia Bird began her career in regional theatre in 1968, when she was 17, as a stage manager. At the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester she progressed to direction, including a production of Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw, and she later took plays to the Young Vic and the ICA theatre. In 1978 she became a resident director at the Royal Court, but a few years later decided that her future lay in television. Antonia Bird won many awards, including Baftas for Safe and Care; she also won a Bafta Children's Award in 2009 for Off By Heart, a documentary about a national poetry competition for schoolchildren. With Irvine Welsh (the author of Trainspotting), the actor Robert Carlyle and the film-maker Mark Cousins, she formed a production company, 4Way Pictures, and her other feature films included Face (1997) - a gangster movie which starred Carlyle alongside Ray Winstone and Blur's Damon Albarn - and Ravenous (1999), in which a small band of American soldiers at a snowbound outpost in California in the 1840s is confronted by a cannibalistic Carlyle. In 2004 Antonia Bird made The Hamburg Cell, a television film which is a fictionalised account of the 9/11 hijackers" recruitment and training in an al-Qaeda camp to prepare for their suicide mission - which they call "the big wedding." She also worked in America, and in 1995 directed Mad Love, starring Drew Barrymore and Chris O'Donnell as high school sweethearts who go on the run after the girl is committed by her parents to a mental hospital. Antonia Bird, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, had been suffering from anaplastic thyroid cancer. Antonia Bird, born May 27 1951, died October 25 2013