John Sayles

Born: 28 September 1950
Where: Schenectady, New York, USA

The writer-director has become America's most celebrated independent filmmaker, flitting through a variety of styles and subjects.

Probably best known for the Oscar-nominated Lone Star, he has also received plaudits for Matewan, City of Hope and Passion Fish.

After acting in school plays while at college, Sayles embarked on a career as a fiction writer, submitting stories to magazines.

Supporting himself as an orderly, labourer and meat packer, he published two novels and a short story anthology.

However, they did not meet financial success and he switched to screen writing, kicking off with an adaptation of Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out.

Landing a place with Roger Corman's New World Pictures, he penned Joe Dante's Piranha, Lewis Teague's The Lady in Red and Jimmy Murakami's Battle Beyond the Stars.

He also scripted two witty genre send-ups in 1981, The Howling, reteaming him with Teague, and Alligator, directed by Dante.

Taking $60,000 earned from screenwriting, Sayles directed his first feature, Return of the Secaucus Seven, a witty, poignant look at a reunion of 1960s activists on the verge of adulthood.

He followed with Lianna, a subtle examination of the changes a married woman undergoes following her discovery that she is a lesbian.

Baby, It's You, the story of a doomed high-school romance between a Jewish girl (Rosanna Arquette) and an Italian youth (Vincent Spano), however, suffered from Paramount studio's involvement (and later abandonment).

Finished screenplays for two pet projects, Matewan and Eight Men Out, had long languished due to their perceived commercial inviability.

Sayles finally made the former in 1987, exploring the personal and political dimensions of union making and breaking in the West Virginia coal mines of the 1920s.

His ambitious Eight Men Out was an account of the 1919 scandal that rocked the baseball world, examined through the eyes of individual ball players.

City of Hope was a sombre study of life in a mid-sized contemporary American town, weaving together several storylines to create a picture of corruption.

In 1992, Passion Fish about the relationship between a paralysed former TV soap star and her live-in nurse landed Sayles his first Oscar nomination for screenplay.

The Secret of Roan Inish reteamed him with Wexler and was a real change of pace as it was filmed on location in the wild western islands of Ireland.

Sayles, whose films had consistently scored with the critics but performed meagerly at the box office, registered his biggest commercial breakthrough with the gritty Lone Star.

Unfortunately, his next film Men With Guns did not fare as well commercially, its lack of name actors and Spanish dialogue dooming it to the fate of so much of his previous work.

Limbo, about a disparate group of people in Alaska, passed by unnoticed but Sunshine State, featuring real estate encroachment in Florida, saw him back on form.

Recent work includes Casa De Los Babys, the story of six women waiting for children in a South American adoption centre.