Celador is a global light entertainment company originally formed as an independent production company in 1983. It has produced a number of popular light entertainment shows and is probably best known for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and co-producing the film Slumdog Millionaire which collected seven masks at the BAFTAS, four Golden Globes and eight Oscars including Best Director and Best Picture in 2009.[1][2]
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Celador was originally taken over by Complete Communications, which bought out shareholders including Paul Smith CBE and Jasper Carrott. Under the ownership of Complete, Celador expanded its fledgling radio, film and international businesses. Later, Complete Communications announced its intention to sell the company. Around the same time as the sell off of Celador International and the rights and associated properties of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to Dutch group 2waytraffic, Celador Productions' management completed a buy out of the company.
In 2006, Celador offered the rights and UK programme library of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? for sale, with a view toward the eventual sale of other parts of the business.[3] In 2004 Celador took legal action against Disney for what it claimed were unpaid profits from Disney’s screening of the programme in the US. At a trial by jury in Los Angeles in June 2010 the jury awarded Celador $269m (£177m) in damages after ruling it failed to receive a fair share of profits.[4]
Celador owns nine UK radio stations.
Slumdog Millionaire the Musical is currently in production for launching in London's West End in 2012.
The current portfolio of stations is:
Paul Smith CBE, is Chairman of Celador Entertainment Limited which is the umbrella company for Celador Films, Celador Radio, Celador Theatrical and LUSAM
Following the new structure of Celador's previous constituent divisions, Celador Productions is now run by managing director (since 2003) Danielle Lux. Christian Colson left Celador Films as Managing Director in 2009 to form Cloud Nine Films, now re-named Cloud Eight Films, of which Paul Smith CBE is a Director.
The name is a respelling of the phrase "cellar door", chosen due to a statement of The Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien that, detached from its meaning, "cellar door" has the most marvelous sounds of all words he knew. In his 1955 essay 'English and Welsh', commenting on his affection for the Welsh language, Tolkien[20] wrote:
'Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling).
'More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.'
There is a scene in the film Donnie Darko where the teacher, Karen Pommeroy, has written the words "cellar door", on the blackboard, before telling her class, ‘This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that Cellar Door is the most beautiful’. When asked about the origin of the phrase, the film’s director, Richard Kelly, attributes it to Edgar Allan Poe.
The phrase has been subject to misattribution. The story may be traced to 1989, with R. Lederer's 'Crazy English' alluding to a survey, conducted in the 1940s, probing the word in the English language generally thought to be the most beautiful. Contributing to this survey, American writer H.L. Mencken supposedly claimed that a Chinese student, who knew little or no English, especially liked the phrase cellar door – not for what it meant, but rather for how it sounded.