James Cameron
Born: August 16 1954
Where: Kapuskasing, Canada
Cameron has become established as a leading sci-fi auteur and a visionary of cinematic special effects - and the man behind the £1.2bn grossing Titanic.
He shrewdly mixes and matches genre conventions, potent cultural signifiers and top-notch FX to comment on both big issues and relationships.
This reached its apotheosis in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, which was both an FX-laded spectacle as well as an old-fashioned romance.
As a youngster interested in astonomy, Cameron reportedly returned to watch Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ten times.
He dropped out of a physics course, married a waitress, and got work as a truck driver but, after viewing Star Wars decided he should be making his own epics.
Cameron raised private financing and directed, shot, edited and built miniatures for his first short film which landed him a job with New World Pictures.
He received his first directing credit on the better-off-forgotten "Piranha II: The Spawning" (1981), an ill-conceived "sequel" to an amusing "Jaws" knockoff.
Cameron then approached producer Gale Anne Hurd and sold her the rights to his Terminator screenplay for one dollar, on the condition that he would be allowed to direct it.
The result was a classic thriller crafted on a modest budget of about $6.5m and launching the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Hardly the standard Hollywood liberal, Cameron worked as a screenwriter (sharing credit with star Sylvester Stallone) on the landmark revisionist war fantasy Rambo: First Blood II.
His follow-up as a writer-director was Aliens, a galvanising sequel to Ridley Scott's memorably horrific 1979 outing, which many found superior to the original.
Aliens snared seven Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Sigourney Weaver and won two statues for Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects.
Cameron's victorious march then faltered with the ambitious, but underperforming, underwater epic The Abyss.
His newly-formed Lightstorm Entertainment made the eagerly awaited 1991 blockbuster sequel "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" which recast Schwarzenegger's mechanical hitman as a hero.
In April 1993, Cameron founded the special effects company Digital Domain with former Industrial Light and Magic staffer Scott Ross and creature-maker/special makeup FX artist Stan Winston.
Their first feature assignment was 1994's True Lies, which marked an elaborate change-of-pace for the modern master of sci-fi action films.
Cameron went on to co-produce and co-write the futuristic Strange Days, which was directed by his third wife Kathryn Bigelow.
Instead, he turned his attention to the project which would consume him for nearly two years, Titanic.
Originally intended for release in July 1997, the film was delayed because of the painstaking state-of-the-art FX technology.
Almost from the outset of filming, the press speculated on the movie's commercial appeal and each rumor was duly reported.
When Titanic was released in December 1997 at a running time of over three hours, it received generally favorable reviews.
But audiences responded to Cameron's ideal and it proved to be a surprising blockbuster, eventually becoming the top grossing film in history.
It received 14 Academy Award nominations, matching the record held by 1950's All About Eve, and went on to win 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, tying the record set by the 1959 remake of Ben-Hur.
His next cinamatic outing was, unsurprisingly enough, the Titanic documentary following his dive to the wreck Ghosts of the Abyss.
Most recently James teams up with NASA scientists to explore the Mid-Ocean Ridge in the documentary Aliens Of The Deep.
