Kathryn Bigelow

Born: 27 November 1951
Where: San Carlos, California

Bigelow entered the cinema by way of the art world. She began her creative life as a painter in her teens, and went on to study it for two years at the San Francisco Art Institute, before winning a prestigious scholarship to the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in 1971.

Moving to New York, the 19-year-old was set up with a studio, and The Whitney displayed one of her works in which viewers listened to a recording of pipes clanging together while all they saw was a still arrangement of chrome pipes on the floor.

Bigelow's first professional art job was working as the assistant to conceptual artist Vito Acconci.

In 1978, she entered the graduate film programme at Columbia University, where she wrote, produced and directed her first short, Set-Up.

Bigelow modeled for a Gap ad after which she moved into feature filmmaking as the co-writer-director of The Loveless - a film which also marked the feature acting debut of Willem Dafoe.

The art movie impressed producer-writer-director Walter Hill who gave Bigelow a development deal when she moved to Los Angeles in 1983. That same year she also made her feature acting debut in Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames.

Bigelow became a cult figure with the 1987 release of Near Dark, a tale of modern-day vampires. Next up came Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, followed by her first collaboration with producer-writer-director James Cameron, Point Break.

She married Titanic director Cameron in 1989, only to divorce two years later.

Her sci-fi film, Strange Days, won some rapturous reviews and was screened at the 1995 New York Film Festival. Bigelow then took a five year break from the big screen, during which time she directed a few episodes of TV series Homicide: Life on the Street, as well as developing a feature about the life of Joan of Arc which at one time Luc Besson was involved in.

In 2000, she was back directing the feature The Weight of Water, a psychological thriller that Variety called "her richest, most ambitious and personal work to date".

She followed directing Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in K-19: The Widowmaker.