Steven Spielberg

Spielberg grew up in Arizona and New Jersey making amateur 8mm films with his father's camera, and was reportedly rejected from USC's prestigious film school multiple times before eventually studying at California State University, Long Beach. He got his professional start directing television, including a celebrated episode of Night Gallery, before Universal signed him to a long-term contract while he was barely out of his teens.

No director has balanced wonder and terror more profitably. From suburban UFO obsession to resurrected dinosaurs, Spielberg's science fiction work defined the emotional register of three decades of genre filmmaking. He broke through with Jaws in 1975, effectively inventing the modern summer blockbuster before he was thirty by combining a genuinely terrifying monster movie with a level of craft critics hadn't expected from someone so young, and he co-founded Amblin Entertainment shortly afterward to give his own sensibility a permanent studio home.

He went on to co-found DreamWorks SKG in the 1990s and has directed or produced an extraordinary volume of the era's most successful and acclaimed films, spanning science fiction, war drama and historical epic alike. Three of his films sit among the highest-grossing of all time, he has won the Best Director Oscar twice, and few filmmakers of any generation have moved as comfortably between pure popcorn spectacle and serious, awards-caliber drama.