Peter Weir

Born: August 21 1944
Where: Sydney, Australia

The five-times Oscar-nominated director is one of Australia's most stylish film-makers.

Career highlights include Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Green Card and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

However, his earlier lesser known movies such as Picnic At Hanging Rock, Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously are also worthy of respect.

Weir briefly attended Sydney University, dropped out to join his father's real estate business and left that job for a trip to Europe in 1966.

Upon his return, he took a job at a TV station and, in his free time, began making short films full of anti-establishment attitudes.

Weir's contribution to the Australian film renaissance of the late 1970s lay in his ability to portray the imminent disruption of the rational world by irrational forces hovering just beyond our mundane lives.

His reputation as the most stylish of the new Australian directors was built on his charting of that country's landscape and cultural oddities with a sense of wonder.

Weir's first feature, The Cars That Ate Paris, portrayed the terror lurking beneath a sleepy Outback town called Paris which profits from highway disasters.

He created another kind of haunting atmosphere for Picnic at Hanging Rock in which a turn-of-the-century girls' school picnic in the Australian bush turns tragic.

Supernatural themes were followed up in 1977's The Last Wave and he switched genres to make the World War One movie Gallipoli starring Mel Gibson.

The Year of Living Dangerously starred Gibson as a journalist and Sigourney Weaver as a couple who fall in love in a war zone.

In the thriller Witness - his first American movie - Weir sensitively recreated the disciplined virtues of the Amish, in pointed contrast to the corrupt world of urban police politics.

Harrison Ford gave an acclaimed performance as John Book, a tough and honest cop who functions in both worlds.

Ford went on to give an underrated tour-de-force performance as an idealistic inventor who packs up his family and leaves America for an untainted village in Central America in The Mosquito Coast.

Robin Williams' exuberance enhanced the comic edges of Dead Poets Society, a popular depiction of an American private boys' school and its repression.

Weir truly went Hollywood with his next outing, the light romantic comedy Green Card but returned to more substantial issues with Fearless.

After a five year absence, the director returned with The Truman Show, which provided a rare dramatic role for comic actor Jim Carrey.

After another lengthy hiatus, Weir returned to the big screen with the absorbing high seas adventure Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.