Peter Jackson
Born: October 1961
Where: New Zealand
Few careers can genuinely be described as meteoric...but Oscar winner Jackson's quantum leap from directing New Zealand art house to the cinematic colossus that is Lord of the Rings easily qualifies.
And, after departing Mawdor, he fulfilled his life's ambition - remaking the 1933 cinema classic King Kong, with a pay packet of $20m and and budget of $207m.
A loner as a child, Jackson first picked up a camera when he was seven and first saw King Kong during a Sunday screening in New Zealand when he was nine.
He originally wanted to be an architect but - with the financial support of his parents - landed a job on the Wellington Evening Post as an engraver.
Earning NZ$200 a week, he spent any spare cash on film stock for his 16mm camera at $100 for three minutes and perfected his style.
His early movies were a world away from the elysian idyll of The Shire and Kong - vomit and blood-soaked features such as his debut Bad Taste, where aliens arrive on Earth to restock their larders with human flesh.
His second feature Meet the Feebles was another venture into comic horror with people replaced with puppets, as a massacre of performers throws suspicion onto one Hilda the Hippo.
He stayed with the same genre but once again used live actors for his international breakthrough film Dead Alive but kept the gross-out quotient.
Some saw Jackson's next film Heavenly Creatures retelling the story of New Zealand's most famous murder case in decades, as both considerably more serious and a real departure.
He followed it up with Jack Brown, Genius, a comedy about a modern inventor and a medieval monk and The Frighteners, a Michael J. Fox starrer about a psychic investigator.
Both films had their moments but seemed like mere breathers coming before the most ambitious undertaking of Jackson's career.
Tolkien's landmark mythological novel The Lord of the Rings got the Jackson treatment and the three films which make up the book were shot back-to-back in his home country.
The first instalment - the Fellowship of the Ring - received a near-record 13 Oscar nominations and the second - The Two Towers - is hailed by critics as even better than the first.
The final instalment, The Return Of The King, garnered 11 nominations. It went on to win every single category it was entered for, becoming the first movie to do so.
In 2005, Jackson returned with King Kong - a film he'd first tried to remake when he was just 12.
The movie, starring Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody and Jack Black, has a running time of three hours and took four years to complete.
