Paul Thomas Anderson

Born: June 26, 1970
Where: Studio City, California, USA

The wunderkind film-maker is widely acknowledged as one of Hollywood's finest - although he's made less than a half a dozen movies.

Three of his five films - Magnolia, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood - have all been nominated for Academy Awards.

The son of an actor who was the voice of the American Broadcasting Company, he was raised in the San Fernando Valley in California.

At the age of 12, Anderson began making movies with a Betamax video camera bought for him by his father, who was also a late-night TV horror movie host known as "Ghoulardi".

He made his first amateur short - The Dirk Diggler Story - about the male porn star John Holmes. The movie would later inspire Boogie Nights.

The budding filmmaker attended Emerson College in Boston and then attended New York University film school but dropped out before he graduated.

(rumour has it he handed in some of Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet's work as his own. When he got it back with a "C" grade he decided to leave).

He began working as a production assistant on music videos and on independent films, and one particular one introduced him to the veteran actor Philip Baker Hall.

In 1992, Anderson directed the short film Coffee and Cigarettes, in which he cast Hall as the careworn gambler Sydney.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and Anderson achieved his first real critical recognition.

Three years later he expanded Cigarettes and Coffee into the full length film Sydney, again starring Hall, and the feature premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Anderson was beginning to rise through the ranks of the industry and renamed his film to Hard Eight and released it in the States.

His second feature proved to be his break. Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg as a porn star, expanded on his original short Dirk Diggler.

It is one of the only films in history with such explicit sexual content to be nominated for an Oscar.

The next couple of years saw diverse work: he directed some big budget music videos and spent much of his time writing what was to become his magnum opus .

Magnolia, a sprawling ensemble piece based around the songs of Aimee Mann, starred Tom Cruise, Julianna Moore, William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Anderson returned in 2002 with the comedy/romance feature Punch-Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler.

The story centers around a beleaguered small-business owner embarking on a romantic journey with a mysterious woman (Emily Watson).

Sandler won positive reviews for his role in his first major departure from the mainstream comedies which made him a star.

In 2008, Daniel Day-Lewis delivered a towering performance as a corrupt oilman in the critically-acclaimed There Will Be Blood.