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Curated category

Directors of Best Picture Academy Award winners

  • Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his…
  • Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the…
  • Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary.
  • Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a…
  • Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest…
  • Peter JacksonPeter Jackson was born on the 31st of October 1961 in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the far northern suburb of Pukerua Bay.
  • Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces.
  • Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish…
  • James CameronOn the 26th of March 2012, James Cameron sat alone inside the Deepsea Challenger and dropped to the deepest point on Earth.
  • William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film.
  • Guillermo del ToroGuillermo del Toro was born on the 9th of October 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and grew up in a house his father once described as "an enchanted castle."…
  • Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo.
  • Laurence OlivierLaurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found…
  • Ron HowardRon Howard was five years old when he stood on a set holding a toy turtle, pretending it was dead. He had to cry. The director helping him through the scene…
  • David LeanDavid Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York…
  • Ridley ScottRidley Scott was born on the 30th of November 1937 in South Shields, a port town on the northeast coast of England, to a father who would serve as a Colonel…
  • John Madden (director)John Philip Madden, born on the 8th of April 1949 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, walked onto one of the most competitive nights in Hollywood history and came away…