Lee Tamahori

Born: 1951
Where: Wellington, New Zealand

The director was catapulted into the big league with the raw social drama Once Were Warriors.

The 1994 New Zealand movie, which focussed on an outcast Maori family and its violent patriarch, won the Anicaflash Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Tamahori has gone on helm increasingly adrenalin-fuelled vehicles including the flabby Bond outing Die Another Day and the barkingly-plotted sequel xXx2.

Half British, half Maori, he began working as a commercial artist and photographer before joining the New Zealand film industry in the late 1970s as a boom operator.

He became an assistant director a decade later and made international award-winning adverts for 10 years.

Success in advertising led to the job of directing Once Were Warriors in 1999 and he made his Hollywood debut with the crime thriller Mulholland Falls with Nick Nolte.

Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin starred in Tamahori's 1997 action adventure The Edge and he went on to helm the crime thriller Along Came A Spider in 2001.

In 2002, he took the reins of the lacklustre Bond blockbuster Die Another Day, starring Pierce Brosnan and an invisible Aston Martin.

Recent work includes the sequel xXx2, with Ice Cube replacing Vin Diesel as the maverick secret agent.