Terry Zwigoff

Born: 1948
Where: Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

The director is best known for his controversial, politically incorrect take on the Father Christmas phenomenon - Bad Santa.

Starring Billy Bob Thornton, the movie caused outrage in the United States where distributor Disney were accused of burying it because of the risque content.

Hailing originally from a family of dairy farmers - "probably the only Jewish farmers in Wisconsin" - his family moved to Chicago when he was five.

In the late 1960s he attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before migrating to San Francisco in 1970.

There he learned to play cello and mandolin and joined the newly-formed Cheap Suit Serenaders.

Soon Zwigoff’s love of music was paralleled by a growing interest in filmmaking.

A lover of comic books and the blues, he made his big screen debut in 1994 with Crumb, a documentary about weird sex and obsessions with comic books.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival but its failure to even win a nomination in the 1994 Academy Awards' Best Documentary Feature category caused uproar.

There was even a demand to change the way the Academy voters choose the documentary feature nominees.

Determinedly ploughing his own furrow, Zwigoff turned down projects like The Virgin Suicides and struggled for five years to make Daniel Clowes' underground comic strip Ghost World a movie.

Finally released in 2001, the film - starring Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannson - was nominated for best adapted screenplay in the 2002 Academy Awards.

In 2003, Bob Thornton played an alcoholic department store Santa who used his job as a front for casing the strongroom.