Jean-Luc Godard

Born: December 3 1930
Where: Paris, France

The one-time petty thief's legacy to world cinema will be measured in terms of influence rather than box office success.

He has only scored one commercial hit - his groundbreaking 1959 feature A bout de souffle, which made a star of Jean-Paul Belmondo.

However, his enormous influence can be seen in the work of directors ranging from Robert Altman to Stephen Soderbergh to Stephen Spielberg.

Born into a wealth Swiss family - his father ran a private clinic and his mother's family were bankers - he was sent to Switzerland during WWII.

Returning to Paris after his parents' divorce in 1948, he attended the Lycee Rohmer before enrolling at the Sorbonne to study ethnology.

However, his increasing fascination with film - he mixed with fellow enthusiasts Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut - alienated his family and they cut off his allowance in 1951.

Faced with poverty, he resorted to petty theft (like the characters in his early movies) and took a job on a Swiss dam project.

The construction firm bought the documentary he shot at the time and he was encouraged to make his feature debut A bout de souffle in 1959.

Reworking the B-movie crime plot, the film was based on an idea by Truffaut and boasted Chabrol as artistic supervisor.

Using hand-held cameras and natural lighting in a precursor to the Danish Dogme movement, the style marked out Godard as an original.

However, as the 1960s progressed, Godard's film-making became more difficult (Les Carabiniers) and he fell out with his former colleagues, particularly Truffaut.

Divorcing his wife Anna Karina, he married actress Anne Wiamemsky but film-wise things were going from bad to worse.

Censors cut Une Femme Mariee, he was prevented from travelling to Vietman to film and TV producers refused to show his film Le Gai Savoir.

After the Paris student rebellion in May 1968, Godard's involvement with far left factions became all-consuming.

From then on his films became radically political with the formation of the Dziga Vertov Group and he left Paris for Grenoble.

In 1976, he quit France altogether for Switzerland and focused on developments in new media, including experimental video for the likes of Channel 4 and UNICEF.

Recent work includes his 2005 meditation on the world's clashing cultures in Notre Musique.