John Frankenheimer

Born: 19th February 1930
Where: New York

He decided he wanted to be an actor but then he applied for and was accepted in the Motion Picture Squadron of the Air Force where he realized his natural talent was to handle a camera.

John left his Air Force film unit and talked his way into an assistant director's job at CBS, which consisted mainly working as a cameraman at that time.

Nevertheless he established himself as one of the most brilliant talents to emerge from TV's "Golden Age", dirceting more than 150 live dramas between 1954 and 1960, like The Last Tycoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Browning Version.

He first turned to the big screen with The Young Stranger, and it wasn't until four years later that John took another chance to move into the cinema industry with the melodrama, The Young Savages, which starred Burt Lancaster.

He followed this with several extremely powerful films, the first being the Cold War thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, which was one of John's finest, the first he instigated and had complete control over.

Seven Days in May featured an all-star cast of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Ava Gardner, and no sooner had he completed the film, Burt Lancaster called him to Paris to replace Arthur Penn as director of the adventure story The Train.

An amateur racer for many years, John derived his greatest pleasure from Grand Prix, a technically brilliant action movie, which was his first film in colour, and scored well with critics and audiences alike.

In June 1968, John's close relationship with Robert F Kennedy ended in tragedy. Kennedy was staying with the director at the time of his assassination at Los Angeles' Ambassador, and in the aftermath, the director plunged into a deep depression.

He moved to Europe, and while he continued to make movies, he struggled a little during the 70s and 80s, after which he returned to the small screen and reinvented himself as an Emmy-winning director of cable movies and miniseries.

In 1993 John directed Elizabeth Taylor in a highly budgeted-perfume ad, and three years later, he made his first feature in five years, The Island of Dr. Moreau, but it wasn't until he directed Ronin with Robert De Niro, that he had a big hit.