Rachel Talalay

Talalay was born in Chicago. Her father Paul Talalay was a pharmacologist, born in Berlin to a Belarusian Jewish family, and her mother Pamela is an English biochemist. She has two sisters and a brother.^[3] She was raised mostly in Baltimore, with two years of her childhood in Britain.^[2] Talalay attended Yale University, where she majored in mathematics, graduating in 1980.^[4][5] She also ran the Yale Film Society.^[4]

Talalay worked in a number of different capacities in filmmaking before making her directorial debut with the film Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).^[6] Talalay also worked on the first four A Nightmare on Elm Street films.^[4] Her work with the earlier Nightmare films utilized her computer skills and finding ways to create better special effects while still keeping costs low.^[4] Despite her familiarity with the Freddy movies, when she directed Freddy's Dead, she was given internal memos telling her not to be "too girly" or "too sensitive."^[7]

Talalay also directed Tank Girl in 1995, and was looking into re-optioning the rights to make a new film in 2008.^[8] As a film producer, Talalay worked with director John Waters on the films Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990). She was also a production assistant on Waters' 1981 film Polyester.^[9][10]

Talalay states that ever since Doctor Who was revived in 2005, she wanted to work on the show.^[11] Talalay directed all three of Peter Capaldi's series finales: series 8's "Dark Water" and "Death in Heaven",^[12] series 9's "Heaven Sent" and "Hell Bent"—the former considered by many to be one of the best episodes in the show's history^[13]—and series 10's "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls",^[14] as well as the Doctor Who 2017 Christmas special, "Twice Upon a Time".^[15] She returned to Doctor Who in 2023 for "The Star Beast" with David Tennant & Catherine Tate returning as the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna Noble as part of the show's 60th anniversary. In 2019, she directed a film adaption of Joe Ballarini's A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting for Netflix.^[16]

Talalay met British film producer Rupert Harvey while working on Android in 1982. They began a relationship soon after, and were married in 1990, with John Waters officiating the wedding.^[5][17] Talalay and Harvey have a daughter named Lucy.^[18]

Director

Producer

TV movies

• A Tale of Two Wives (2003)
• The Wind in the Willows (2006)
• Hannah's Law (2012)
• The Dorm (2014)
• Unclaimed (2016)

TV series