Peter Starr Motorcyclist, filmmaker... and more

Expatriate Englishman, Peter Starr, has made America his home for over 50 years and, over those decades, has enjoyed the accolades bestowed upon him as one of the pioneers of filming and televising motorcycle sport in the USA

- Bruce Cox

Starr was honoured as such by being elected to the American Motorcyclist Association’s ‘Hall of Fame’ in 2017 and the plaudits didn’t stop there. The influential Hollywood newspaper Daily Variety recently said of him, ‘Starr is generally recognised as the top producer of motorcycle pix in the world.’

One reason for that is because long before he shot his first frame he was a motorcyclist through and through and, if you are going to become a maker of motorcycle films, it pays dividends to having first been a motorcyclist.

He was born in Coventry in 1942 and, as a 21-year-old, he rode his Triumph Tiger 100 on a 2500-mile trip to Vienna and back, taking in everything from autobahns to Tyrolean mountain passes. And back home in the UK, whenever he had time to spare, he would head west on the Triumph to spend the day riding the mountain roads of north and mid-Wales. No surprise then that he chose motorcycling as the focus of his future career as a filmmaker.

In 1965, Peter moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where, thanks to his English accent and knowledge of the current music scene, reinvented himself as a disc jockey with the local radio station. This was at the height of the ‘British invasion’ and the station thought it really cool to have a DJ with a strong English accent hosting some of its shows. His DJ career continued via radio stations in North Carolina, Texas and Vancouver, Canada, and he then parlayed his radio links with the music industry into the next stage of his career, which was four years as a record producer with companies like A&M, United Artists and MGM.