Paula Milne is a renowned British screenwriter who left school at the age of 15 without any academic qualifications. She then studied Fine Art at the Central School of Art and Design and film-making at the Royal College of Art. Her career in television began as a script reader at ATV, followed by two years at the BBC as a script editor in the series department where she created the groundbreaking hit show Angels.
In the 1990s, Paula was part of a cultural delegation that visited Central America, particularly Nicaragua and Honduras. She later spent time in the Brazilian rain forests researching a feature film, Terra Roxa, and in Minnesota, researching a feature film, Blue Earth, about AIDS. She has extensively traveled in the United States, researching her other feature films.
Paula's first feature film in Hollywood was Mad Love, a road movie starring Drew Barrymore and Chris O'Donnell. Her critically acclaimed film, Hollow Reed, led Variety to comment, "One cannot be unmoved by the sensitive portrayal of the terrible pain at the story's center, especially when it's caused by good intentions." The film won the Prix de Publique at the Dinard Film Festival.
Paula also wrote I Dreamed of Africa, which was shot in Africa and stars Kim Basinger, directed by Hugh Hudson, about a husband and wife attempting to build a new life for themselves in the Rift Valley. She spent extensive time researching the film in Kenya with Kuki Gallman, on whose life the movie is based.
In addition to her feature films, Paula has written several television dramas, including the critically acclaimed mini-series Second Sight, starring Clive Owen as a detective progressively going blind, who uses his disturbing hallucinations to help solve a homicide case. The mini-series aired on Sunday nights on BBC 1 and was voted Best Mini-series by the Los Angeles Times in 2002.
Paula has also written a four-hour political thriller mystery for ITV called Thursday 12th, a two-part thriller State of Mind, and a screenplay based on Anne Robinson's autobiography Memoirs of An Unfit Mother for Tiger Aspect/BBC with Paul Greengrass producing.
Her epic serial The Virgin Queen, based on Elizabeth I, was transmitted on PBS in November 2005 and on BBC 1 in January 2006, to critical acclaim. She has also written a screenplay based on Sarah Waters' novel The Night Watch, which was transmitted on BBC 2 to universal acclaim.
In 2010, Paula's adaptation of the epic Orange-winning novel Small Island about the first wave of "Windrush" immigrants was the centerpiece of the BBC 1 Autumn schedule. Her critically acclaimed adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel The Night Watch was transmitted on BBC 2 to universal acclaim.
In 2012, her original six-part serial for BBC TWO entitled White Heat, which traces a group of people through the political maelstrom of the sixties until the present day, was transmitted in 2012. Her most recent credit was one-off film Legacy in November 2013 on BBC2.
Paula is currently working on several projects, including a six-part drama serial called The Same Sky, about spies and a family divided by the Berlin Wall, set in 1973, and a three-part Gothic drama based on the famous love story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning called Love Among the Ruins.
