Wes Craven

Born: August 2 1939
Where: Cleveland, Ohio. USA

The university lecturer-turned-fright master practically re-invented the teen horror genre with the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

An intellectual artist trapped in a disreputable job, he went on to masterfully parody his own product with the spoof Scream series.

Craven weathered an unhappy fundamentalist baptist family upbringing (his father died when he was four) before leaving Cleveland to study English Literature.

(told that films were the work of the devil, he never went to the cinema until he attended college).

After illness while attending Wheaton College, illinois, he left the school for a year before returning to study psychology, taking his masters from J Hopkins University in 1963.

He quit his job teaching literature to become a cab driver before landing a post as a sound editor for a New York post production company.

After co-directing 1971's Together with Sean S Cunningham (who would go on to helm Friday the 13th), he broke out on his own.

The shockingly violent The Last House On The Left, which Craven reputedly adapted from Ingmar Bergman's 1960 movie The Spring Cave, was so repellent it was banned in Britain.

However, the $60,000 "revenge for rape" story did brisk business at the box office despite liberal protestations.

Craven continued to work as a film editor and scriptwriter but met little success despite branching out into other fields including war, romance and comedy.

Five years later The Hills Have Eyes, about a cannabalistic family living in the wilds, divided critics but kept the accountants happy.

He returned to features in 1981 with Deadly Blessing, an uneven but frightening tale of a woman terrorised by a rural religious cult and featuring a young Sharon Stone.

Swamp Thing followed in 1982, a sci-fi thriller about an experiment that has gone horribly wrong.

Craven finally gained mainstream recognition and success with A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which the horrific Freddy Krueger haunts the dreams of small-town American teens.

(it was said he got the name of the multi-knife-wielding maniac from a boy who used to bully him at school).

Five popular and increasingly camp sequels followed the hard-edged and strikingly surreal original with Craven's involvement down a minimum.

The franchise generated more than £350m but the creator received a paltry £275,000 after signing away his rights so as to secure the director's chair for the first film.

In 1985, he worked on TV's The Twilight Zone and returned to the big screen with the sci-fi horror of Deadly Friend and the black magic chiller The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Subsequent outings included the routine Shocker and The People Under The Stairs and a reteaming of the Elm Street crew for 1994's Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Two years later he hit box office gold again with parodic Scream series, which landed the original with MTV's 1996 Best Movie Award.

In a bold step away from horror, Craven then directed the sentimental drama Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep as a violin teacher giving hope to kids.

He was back on familiar territory with Scream 3 and, in 2005, directed the likeable werewolf yarn Cursed with Christina Ricci.