Steven Spielberg
Born: December 18, 1945
Where: Cincinnati, US
Possibly the most renowned American film-maker of this century, Spielberg has directed or produced eight of the thirty top grossing films of all time.
Jurassic Park, ET: The Extraterrestrial, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and the Indiana Jones films have all entered movie folklore in a body of material unsurpassed.
At 13, he won a local contest for his 40 minute film, Escape to Nowhere and three years later made Firelight (an early precursor to Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Despite his early success, Spielberg was unable to get into a film school, and instead settled for majoring in English Literature at California State University in Long Beach.
Legend has it that while on a tour of Universal Studios he discovered an abandoned cupboard, where he set up an office and would go to work there everyday in a suit and tie.
With a $15,000 budget he made Amblin, a short which would win several film festival awards and also get the attention of the movie studios - more specifically, Universal Studios.
Spielberg's television success was soon parlayed into big screen stardom with his first feature - 1974's The Sugarland Express, which won a best screenplay award at Cannes.
The following year came man-eating shark yarn Jaws, which captured the attention of the world and has become a part of contemporary pop culture.
That was followed by sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind and one of Spielberg's rare failures - 1941.
He was soon back on song with the first in the phenomenally successful Indiana Jones series, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
ET: The Extraterrestrial came next followed by the incredibly different Poltergeist, The Colour Purple, Always and Hook.
Jurassic Park kicked off another hit franchise, with Spielberg handing the reins for the third part to another director.
In 1993, Spielberg made Schindler's List, a haunting epic that depicted the Holocaust in its ugly truth and would finally win Spielberg a Best Picture Oscar among six others.
It has now become part of the regular curriculum in many schools and is considered by many to be the most significant film of this generation.
Harrowing war story Saving Private Ryan saw Spielberg reunited with Tom Hanks and this was followed by AI, a bizarre "collaboration" with the late Stanley Kubrick.
Recently, Spielberg has shown himself to be at the top of his game with Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, scam caper Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DiCaprio and romantic comedy The Terminal with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Spielberg favourite, Tom Hanks.
Business dealings and work aside, Spielberg has always maintained that for him, family is the most important thing.
In 1979 he married actress Amy Irving and together they had a son, Max. However, they divorced in 1989.
Spielberg met actress Kate Capshaw when she was auditioning for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Not only would she be cast, but the two would begin a relationship and eventually marry in 1991.
They both brought one child from a previous marriage to the relationship, and altogether they currently have seven children, two of which were adopted.
In 2005, Spielberg returned to the big screen with a bang with his critically acclaimed adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise.
He followed it up with the controversial thriller Munich, which tells the story of Israel's assassination campaign against those behind the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
In 2008, he delighted the legions of action fans when he returned with Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
