George A Romero

Born: February 4 1940
Where: New York, USA

The innovative horror director is credited with helping start the new wave of chillers with his cult hit Night of the Living Dead.

As a teenager he made short 8mm films and during shooting of The Man From Meteor in 1954 was arrested by police for lobbing a blazing dummy off a building.

After studying art and theatre design at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University he stayed on in the city and formed The Latent Image production company.

Chipping in $10,000 apiece, he and his friends produced what was to become one of the most acclaimed horror films of the genre.

Shot in black and white, Night of the Living Dead - about flesh-eating zombies roaming the land - was made for around $100,000 in 1968 and became an enormous hit.

It even provoked an appalled Readers Digest to call for a national ban on grounds of taste.

His subsequent movies, including the Crazies in 1973 and Hungry Wives (where he met his future wife Christine Forrest) never matched up to their predecessor.

However, in 1979 Martin - about a teenager who is convinced he is a vampire - saw Romero back on gory form.

The same year NOTLD sequel Dawn of the Dead was praised as superior to the original, mixing horror and satire as the undead attack a shopping mall.

Knightriders was about a gang of motorcyclists living by a medieval code while Creepshow (featuring a Stephen King script) saw him happily returning to the horror genre.

In 1985, Day of the Dead was the weakest instalment in what was ostensibly a trilogy while Monkey Shines was hailed by Newsweek as a "white knuckle triumph".

He executive-produced the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead and went on to make revenge tale Bruiser.

In 2005, he added a fourth instalment to the zombie series with Land of the Dead, starring Dennis Hopper and Simon Baker.