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Charles Stuart Kaufman (born November 1st, 1958) is an Academy Award, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit Award-winning American screenwriter, playwright, film producer, theater director and filmmaker. In 2003 he was listed at #100 on Premiere`s annual "Power 100" list. He was also identified by Time Magazine in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
He first came to mainstream notice as the writer of Being John Malkovich (directed by Spike Jonze), earning an Oscar nomination for his effort and winning a BAFTA. He also wrote Human Nature, which was directed by Michel Gondry, and then worked with Jonze again as the screenwriter for "Adaptation." which earned him another Oscar nomination and his second BAFTA. Adaptation. featured a "Charlie Kaufman" character who is a heavily fictionalized version of the screenwriter and who has an "identical twin brother," Donald, a sell-out screenwriter reflecting Kaufman`s anxieties about Hollywood. The DVD edition of Adaptation. contains a filmography which lists Donald Kaufman as having written the screenplay for the movie. The credits of the film close with the words "in loving memory of Donald Kaufman".
Kaufman made his directorial debut with his next project, Synecdoche, New York. Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest and Michelle Williams star in the film, which tells "the story of an anguished playwright who is forced to deal with several women in his life." It premiered at The Cannes Film Festival 2008.
He was born to a Jewish family in New York City, but they moved away shortly after. Kaufman is a graduate of William H. Hall High School in West Hartford, Connecticut. He then briefly attended Boston University before transferring to NYU Film School, where one of his classmates was filmmaker Chris Columbus.
Kaufman lived and worked for a time during the late 1980s in Minneapolis, answering calls about missing newspapers at the Star Tribune before moving to Los Angeles.
He currently lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife and two children.

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