John Michael Crichton
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Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, which Steven Spielberg turned into a blockbuster film in 1993, and created the television series ER, which won multiple Emmys. A Harvard Medical School graduate, he wrote under pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson before achieving fame. He died of lymphatic cancer in 2008 at age 66.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Michael Crichton — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Michael Crichton by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Michael Crichton — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Michael Crichton grew up in Roslyn, New York, where his father, a journalist, encouraged his writing. He played basketball at Roslyn High School and later attended Harvard College. After a disillusioning experience with the English department, he switched to Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1969. During medical school, he wrote novels under pseudonyms, including John Lange, a nod to his 6-foot-9 height.
Crichton’s first directorial effort was Westworld 1973, based on his own novel. He later wrote the novel Jurassic Park 1990, which Steven Spielberg adapted into a 1993 film that became a cultural phenomenon. Crichton also created the medical drama ER, which aired from 1994 and won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series. He wrote under the pseudonyms Jeffery Hudson and John Lange, and his novel A Case of Need won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Other notable adaptations include The Andromeda Strain 1971 and Disclosure 1994.
Crichton was married five times, including to Anne Marie Martin from 1987 to 2002 and Sherri Alexander from 2005 until his death. He had a daughter, Taylor Anne, born in 1989, and a son, John Michael Todd, born three months after his death in 2009. In 1986, he underwent an exorcism, and in 2002, he was robbed at gunpoint in his Santa Monica home.
Crichton’s work continues to influence popular culture. Jurassic Park spawned a multi-billion dollar franchise, and ER set the standard for medical dramas on television. He received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his work in filmmaking. His posthumous honors include the birth of his son and continued readership. He is best remembered for his blend of science and thriller genres.
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Every award, honor, and recognition received by Michael Crichton — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Michael Crichton's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Michael Crichton — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
I Went to a Museum and They Had This Sideshow. There Was a Little Boy Who Couldn’t Have Been More Than Six. His Feet Didn’t Even Touch the Ground. Each Time They Showed a Dinosaur He Would Shout, Tyrannosaurus! Stegosaurus!. He Did That for an Hour and I Thought, What Is It About Dinosaurs That’s so Fascinating? That’s When I Decided to Write Jurassic Park.
In the Information Society, Nobody Thinks. We Expect to Banish Paper, but We Actually Banish Thought.
We All Live Every Day in Virtual Environments, Defined by Our Ideas.
I Am Certain There Is Too Much Certainty in the World.
Readers Probably Haven’t Heard Much About It Yet, but They Will. Quantum Technology Turns Ordinary Reality Upside Down.
I Tended to Faint When I Saw Accident Victims in the Emergency Ward, During Surgery, or While Drawing Blood.
Historically, the Claim of Consensus Has Been the First Refuge of Scoundrels; It Is a Way to Avoid Debate by Claiming That the Matter Is Already Settled.
They Are Focused on Whether They Can Do Something. They Never Think Whether They Should Do Something.
Whenever You Hear the Consensus of Scientists Agrees on Something or Other, Reach for Your Wallet, Because You’re Being Had.
I Want a News Service That Tells Me What No One Knows but Is True Nonetheless.
The Belief That There Are Other Life Forms in the Universe Is a Matter of Faith. There Is Not a Single Shred of Evidence for Any Other Life Forms, and in Forty Years of Searching, None Has Been Discovered. There Is Absolutely No Evidentiary Reason to Maintain This Belief.
The American Media Produce a Product of Very Poor Quality. Its Information Is Not Reliable, It Has Too Much Chrome and Glitz, Its Doors Rattle, It Breaks Down Almost Immediately, and It’s Sold Without Warranty. It’s Flashy, but It’s Basically Junk.
Books Aren’t Written They’re Rewritten. Including Your Own. It Is One of the Hardest Things to Accept, Especially After the Seventh Rewrite Hasn’t Quite Done It.
Scientific Research Was Much Like Prospecting: You Went Out and You Hunted, Armed with Your Maps and Your Instruments, but in the End Your Preparations Did Not Matter, or Even Your Intuition. You Needed Your Luck, and Whatever Benefits Accrued to the Diligent, Through Sheer, Grinding Hard Work.
To Give up Responsibility for Our Lives Is Not Healthy.
The Biologist R. A. Janek Has Said That Increasing Vision Is Increasingly Expensive. He Meant by This That Any Machine to Enable Men to See Finer or Fainter Details Increased in Cost Faster Than It Increased in Resolving Power.
The Best Doctors Found a Middle Position Where They Were Neither Overwhelmed by Their Feelings nor Estranged from Them. That Was the Most Difficult Position of All, and the Precise Balance Neither Too Detached nor Too Caring Was Something Few Learned.
Human Intelligence Was More Trouble Than It Was Worth. It Was More Destructive Than Creative, More Confusing Than Revealing, More Discouraging Than Satisfying, More Spiteful Than Charitable.
Sometimes I Think Man Needs to Feel a Special Position Within Nature, and This Leads Him to Believe That He Is Either Specially Hated by Other Animals or Specially Cherished. Instead of the Truth, Which Is That He’s Just Another Animal on the Plain a Smart One, but Just Another Animal.
Reality Is Always Greater Much Greater Than What We Know, Than Whatever We Can Say About It.
Science Can’t Tell You Why Anything Happens.
What’s Really Wrong with Making Them the Problem Is That You Abdicate Your Own Responsibility. Once You Say Some Mysterious They Is in Charge, Then You’re Able to Sit Back Comfortably and Complain About How They Are Doing It.
Although Knowledge of How Things Work Is Sufficient to Allow Manipulation of Nature, What Humans Really Want to Know Is Why Things Work. Children Don’t Ask How the Sky Is Blue, They Ask Why the Sky Is Blue.
For Hundreds of Years, Science Has Been so Successful That the Tailor Has Taken Over Our Society. His Knowledge Seems so Much More Precise and Powerful Than the Knowledge Offered by Other Disciplines, Such as History or Psychology or Art. but in the End One Can Be Left with a Nagging Sense of Emptiness About the Creations of Science. One May Even Suspect That There Is More to Reality Than Measurements Will Ever Reveal.
Truly, Can You Imagine Anything More Boring Than Fashion? Professional Sports, Perhaps. Grown Men Swatting Little Balls, While the Rest of the World Pays Money to Applaud. But, on the Whole, I Find Fashion Even More Tedious Than Sports.
Science Is Very Good as Far as It Goes. It Has Certainly Produced Powerful Benefits. It Would Be Crazy to Abandon Science, or to Deny Its Validity. but It Would Be Equally Crazy to Think That Reality Is a Forty Four Long.
Science Is the Most Exciting and Sustained Enterprise of Discovery in the History of Our Species. It Is the Great Adventure of Our Time.
Whatever I Am Doing, I Wish I Were Doing One of the Other Things.
Let’s Be Clear: All Professions Look Bad in the Movies. and There’s a Good Reason for This. Movies Don’t Portray Career Paths, They Conscript Interesting Lifestyles to Serve a Plot. so Lawyers Are All Unscrupulous and Doctors Are All Uncaring. Psychiatrists Are All Crazy, and Politicians Are All Corrupt. All Cops Are Psychopaths, and All Businessmen Are Crooks. Even Moviemakers Come off Badly: Directors Are Megalomaniacs, Actors Are Spoiled Brats. Since All Occupations Are Portrayed Negatively, Why Expect Scientists to Be Treated Differently?
Being on Hold Is the Technological Equivalent of Purgatory.
Even If You Don’t Believe in God, You Still Have to Believe in Something That Gives Meaning to Your Life, and Shapes Your Sense of the World. Such a Belief Is Religious.
What Makes You Think Human Beings Are Sentient and Aware? There’s No Evidence for It. Human Beings Never Think for Themselves, They Find It Too Uncomfortable. for the Most Part, Members of Our Species Simply Repeat What They Are Told and Become Upset If They Are Exposed to Any Different View. the Characteristic Human Trait Is Not Awareness but Conformity, and the Characteristic Result Is Religious Warfare. Other Animals Fight for Territory or Food; But, Uniquely in the Animal Kingdom, Human Beings Fight for Their ‘Beliefs.’ the Reason Is That Beliefs Guide Behavior Which Has Evolutionary Importance Among Human Beings. but at a Time When Our Behavior May Well Lead Us to Extinction, I See No Reason to Assume We Have Any Awareness at All. We Are Stubborn, Self Destructive Conformists. Any Other View of Our Species Is Just a Self Congratulatory Delusion.
Life Is Wonderful. It’s a Gift to Be Alive, to See the Sun and Breathe the Air. and There Isn’t Really Anything Else.
The Romantic View of the Natural World as a Blissful Eden Is Only Held by People Who Have No Actual Experience of Nature. People Who Live in Nature Are Not Romantic About It at All. They May Hold Spiritual Beliefs About the World Around Them, They May Have a Sense of the Unity of Nature or the Aliveness of All Things, but They Still Kill the Animals and Uproot the Plants in Order to Eat, to Live. If They Don’t, They Will Die.
The Truth Is, Almost Nobody Wants to Experience Real Nature. What People Want Is to Spend a Week or Two in a Cabin in the Woods, with Screens on the Windows. They Want a Simplified Life for a While, Without All Their Stuff. or a Nice River Rafting Trip for a Few Days, with Somebody Else Doing the Cooking. Nobody Wants to Go Back to Nature in Any Real Way, and Nobody Does. It’s All Talk and as the Years Go On, and the World Population Grows Increasingly Urban, It’s Uninformed Talk. Farmers Know What They’re Talking About. City People Don’t. It’s All Fantasy.
Never Take a Position Unless You Are Certain It Can Be Defended Any Onslaught. That May Sound Like Good Advice to a General, but Then, a Courtroom Is Nothing More Then a Very Civilized War.
Things Do Not Turn Out the Way You Think They Will.
Little-known facts about Michael Crichton — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
Crichton often told the story of his first visit to Universal Studios, where a young Steven Spielberg gave him a tour of the lot. Nearly two decades later, Spielberg contacted Crichton about a project that was shelved in favor of adapting Jurassic Park 1993.
While writing Jurassic Park 1993, Crichton ate egg salad sandwiches with lots of pepper every day for lunch to maintain concentration.
After the success of Jurassic Park 1993, Rising Sun 1993, Disclosure 1994, and Congo 1995, Crichton was paid a substantial sum for the movie rights to his future bestseller Airframe before it was even published. Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Demi Moore were reportedly linked to the project, but the adaptation was permanently shelved when Crichton could not agree on a screenplay. He returned the money.
On September 23, 2002, Crichton was tied up and robbed at gunpoint by masked men in his home in Santa Monica, California. No one was harmed.
ER 1994 began its life in the early 1970s as E.W.: Emergency Ward, a full-length film script. Crichton was unable to get it produced. Steven Spielberg contacted him about it in 1989, expressing interest in turning it into a movie, but it was dropped when Spielberg heard about Jurassic Park 1993. During the film’s production, someone at Amblin Entertainment read it and suggested it was better suited for a television series.
Crichton’s son, John Michael Todd Crichton, was born on February 12, 2009, three months after his death.
Crichton was exorcised in 1986.
He attended Harvard Medical School.
Of all the film adaptations made from his novels, Crichton said the best was Jurassic Park 1993 and the worst was The Terminal Man 1974.
Director Nicolas Roeg originally wanted Crichton to play the alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth 1976. The role eventually went to androgynous rock star David Bowie instead.
After failing to get producers interested in ER 1994 in 1970, the script sat in a metal safe for twenty years until Steven Spielberg heard about it.
Crichton’s original job was as an anthropology professor.
His first child, daughter Taylor Anne, was born in 1989.
He wrote a screenplay about a genetically engineered dinosaur in 1983, but it was never produced.
Later in his career, Crichton became a vocal skeptic of environmentalism and global warming.
He frequently hired Jerry Goldsmith to compose the scores for his films.
Crichton won the Association of American Medical Writers award for Five Patients.
He wrote two stories about futuristic theme parks that go haywire: Westworld 1973 and Jurassic Park 1993. Both films feature actors who worked with John Sturges: Yul Brynner appeared in The Magnificent Seven 1960 and Richard Attenborough appeared in The Great Escape 1963.
Crichton won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for A Case of Need.
He also won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for The Great Train Robbery 1978.
He played basketball at Roslyn High School.
He was a visiting writer at MIT.
Crichton was raised in Roslyn, New York.
Biography and bibliography in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, volume 127, pages 65-72, Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, 1994.
Biography in John Wakeman, editor, World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985, pp. 248-250, New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
Crichton used the pseudonym Michael Douglas for some works.
The pseudonym John Lange comes from the German word for long, referencing his 6-foot-9 height.
The pseudonym Jeffery Hudson was taken from a famous 17th century dwarf.
Crichton was uncredited as a bearded surgeon in The Andromeda Strain 1971.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Michael Crichton.
Celebrities similar to Michael Crichton — same craft, ranked by reach.
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