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Guy Ritchie is a British filmmaker most famous for his decade-long marriage to Madonna. He directed the hits Snatch and Sherlock Holmes, and has an ongoing fascination with making films about street violence.

And he has dyslexia.

Guy-Ritchie_1Ritchie struggled with schoolwork from a young age. His response to his difficulties was to become a troublemaker, and Ritchie attended no less than 10 schools in total. He was expelled at 15 from one of the top private schools in the country, and left school at 16 with only one GSCE – in film studies, of course!

Ritchie has said that his struggle with the learning disability was responsible for his negative attitude towards studies as a teenager. “By the time I found out I was dyslexic, I didn’t give a hoot. Even when IQ tests showed that I was bright, I wasn’t interested. I found out so early that I couldn’t do schoolwork that I was just interested in being disruptive.”

He was always fascinated by stories however, and like to listen to stories on tape – Sherlock Holmes was a particular fascination. He knew all the stories by heart just be listening to them. He later made the recent blockbuster movie starting Robert Downey Jr.

Despite his dyslexia, he now reads voraciously, underlining sections he wants to commit to memory – perhaps for use in a future film!
Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist at Morgan Learning, publishers of the Easyread System. Easyread is an online course specially designed for children with highly visual learning styles, dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, and six other causes of reading difficulty. Find out more at www.easyreadsystem.com