David Cronenberg

Born: March 15 1943
Where: Toronto, Canada

The director - known as "Dave Deprave" - made his name with a series of gruesome horror flicks in the late 1970s.

Infamous offerings included Scanners - in which a human head explodes - and The Fly, during which Jeff Goldblum mutates into an insect.

However, he has recently moved towards the mainstream with the psychological drama Spider and the revenge thriller A History of Violence.

The son of a journalist and a musician, he graduated from Toronto University with a literature degree.

He began making short films while in college before completing his first feature, Stereo, in 1969.

He refined his skills in Canadian TV over the next few years before embarking on a series of features that gave him a cult reputation.

These included Shivers, about slug like parasites that drove their hosts sex mad - and Rabid, in which porn star Marilyn Chambers played a sexual vampire.

In 1981, Scanners featured a a group of people with terrifying psychic powers while 1983's Dead Zone saw Cronenberg adapting a Stephen King novel.

Goldblum starred in the extremely nasty remake of 1958's The Fly while Jeremy Irons played two disturbed psychologist brothers in Dead Ringers.

He was lined up to direct Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall before Paul Verhoeven took over the project.

In 1991, Cronenberg adapted William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch with mixed results and he went on to make M Butterfly for the big screen.

His 1996 adaptation of JG Ballard's Crash, about people who stage serious car accidents for erotic kicks, was widely denounced, especially in Britain, as sickening.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law starred in the sci-fi thriller eXistenZ and Ralph Fiennes starred as a mentally-disturbed man who regresses to his childhood in Spider.

Recent work includes the thriller A History of Violence starring Viggo Mortensen and regarded as a move towards the mainstream for the director.