PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: directing (movie and theater)
English-born American director
Alfred Hitchcock was an English-born American motion-picture director whose suspenseful films and television programs won immense popularity and critical acclaim over a long and tremendously productive...
American film director and producer
Steven Spielberg is an American motion-picture director and producer whose diverse films—which ranged from science-fiction fare, including such classics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and...
American actor and director
Woody Allen is an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author who is best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and...
American actor, director, and writer
Orson Welles was an American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. His innovative narrative techniques and use of photography, dramatic lighting, and music to further the dramatic line...
American director
Martin Scorsese is an American filmmaker known for his harsh, often violent depictions of American culture. From the 1970s, Scorsese created a body of work that was ambitious, bold, and brilliant. But...
American director
Vincente Minnelli was an American motion-picture director who infused a new sophistication and vitality into filmed musicals in the 1940s and ’50s. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)...
American director, writer, and actor
John Huston was an American motion-picture director, writer, and actor whose taut dramas were among the most popular Hollywood films from the early 1940s to the mid-1980s. Many of his films were literary...
American film director
Frank Capra was an American motion-picture director who was the most prominent filmmaker of the 1930s, during which he won three Academy Awards as best director. His most-beloved films, many of which were...
Hungarian-American director, actor, and writer
Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian-born American motion-picture director whose prolific output as a contract director for Warner Brothers consisted of numerous genre films along with a string of motion picture...
American director
William Wyler was a German-born American director of motion pictures that combined a high degree of technical polish with a clear narrative style and sensitive handling of human relationships. Most of...
American director
Howard Hawks was an American motion-picture director who maintained a consistent personal style within the framework of traditional film genres in work that ranged from the 1920s to the ’70s. Although...
American director and producer
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born American motion-picture scenarist, director, and producer known for films that humorously treat subjects of controversy and offer biting indictments of hypocrisy in American...
American director
Raoul Walsh was an American motion-picture director popular in the 1930s and 1940s for his tough, masculine films starring such actors as Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and James Cagney. (Read Martin Scorsese’s...
American director and screenwriter
Francis Ford Coppola is an American motion-picture director, writer, and producer whose films range from sweeping epics to small-scale character studies. As the director of films such as The Godfather...
American director
Stanley Kubrick was an American motion-picture director and writer whose films are characterized by his dramatic visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic or pessimistic...
American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic
Harry Smith was an American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic. Smith is best known as the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), which served as a...
British actor, director, writer, and composer
Charlie Chaplin was a British comedian, producer, writer, director, and composer who is widely regarded as the greatest comic artist of the screen and one of the most important figures in motion-picture...
American actor and director
Clint Eastwood is an American film actor who emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars in the 1960s, known for his portrayal of tough individualists, first as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s...
American director
Norman Taurog was an American director of some 80 feature films, many of which were comedies, including a number with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and musicals, nine of which starred Elvis Presley. However,...
American director and producer
Mervyn LeRoy was an American motion-picture director whose wide variety of films included dramas, romances, epics, comedies, and musicals. He also produced films, including the classic The Wizard of Oz...
American director
Robert Altman was an unconventional and independent American motion-picture director, whose works emphasize character and atmosphere over plot in exploring themes of innocence, corruption, and survival....
American director
George Stevens was an American director known for films that exhibited intelligence, great humanism, and brilliant camera techniques. His classic movies include the screwball comedy Woman of the Year (1942),...
American film director
King Vidor was an American motion-picture director whose films of the 1920s and ’30s in both content and theme were among the most creative of those produced in Hollywood; they deal in relatively uncompromising...
German director
Fritz Lang was an Austrian-born American motion-picture director whose films, dealing with fate and people’s inevitable working out of their destinies, are considered masterpieces of visual composition...
American filmmaker
Otto Preminger was an Austrian-born American director who defied Hollywood’s Production Code with a series of controversial films—notably The Moon Is Blue (1953), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and...
American director
W.S. Van Dyke was an American film director who was a reliable craftsman known for his quick and efficient style of shooting. He made a number of commercial hits, though arguably his best-known films were...
American director
Sidney Lumet was an American film director who was noted for his psychological dramas, which typically featured characters wrestling with moral or emotional conflicts involving betrayal, corruption, or...
American film director
George Cukor was an American motion-picture director who produced films of high quality for 50 years, combining his skill in working with actors, especially actresses, and his careful attention to details....
Spanish director
Luis Buñuel was a Spanish filmmaker who was a leading figure in Surrealism, the tenets of which suffused both his life and his work. An unregenerate atheist and communist sympathizer who was preoccupied...
American director
Mike Nichols was an American motion-picture, television, and stage director whose productions focus on the absurdities and horrors of modern life as revealed in personal relationships. (Read Martin Scorsese’s...
American director
George Marshall was an American film director who, during a career that spanned more than 50 years, proved adept at most genres, with comedies, musicals, and westerns dominating his oeuvre. (Read Martin...
Swedish film director
Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish film writer and director who achieved world fame with such films as Det sjunde inseglet (1957; The Seventh Seal); Smultronstället (1957; Wild Strawberries); the trilogy Såsom...
American film director and producer
Frank Borzage was an American motion-picture director and producer noted for his romantic transcendentalism and technically impeccable filmmaking. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)...
American director
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born American motion-picture director who was best known for sophisticated comedies of manners and romantic comedies. Lubitsch was an anomaly as an active director who also...
American actor and philanthropist
Paul Newman was an American actor and director whose striking good looks, intelligence, and charisma became hallmarks in a film career that spanned more than 50 years, during which time he became known...
American director
Fred Zinnemann was an Austrian-born American motion-picture director whose films are distinguished by realism of atmosphere and characterization and often grounded in crises of conscience. He was nominated...
American director
Lloyd Bacon was an American director who made some 100 films and was known for his efficiency and businesslike approach; his popular movies included 42nd Street (1933) and It Happens Every Spring (1949)....
American director and author
Elia Kazan was a Turkish-born American film director and author noted for his successes on the stage—especially with plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller—as well as for his critically acclaimed...
American director and producer
Robert Wise was an American movie director and producer whose many works include successful films of nearly every genre, though he is best remembered for the two musicals for which he won Academy Awards...
American director
D.W. Griffith was a pioneer American motion-picture director credited with developing many of the basic techniques of filmmaking, in such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken...
German-born film director
William Dieterle was a German-born filmmaker who directed a diverse range of movies but was perhaps best known for a series of acclaimed biopics, one of which won the Warner Brothers studio its first-ever...
Italian filmmaker
Federico Fellini was an Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and singular filmmakers of the period after World War II. Influenced early in his career by the Neorealist movement, he...
American director
Sam Wood was an American filmmaker who was one of Hollywood’s leading directors in the 1930s and ’40s, during which time he made such classics as A Night at the Opera (1935), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939),...
American director
Anthony Mann was an American film director. A poet of action and retribution in the old American West, Mann has long been recognized as an example of the kind of director auteurists love: one who offers...
Austrian-American director
Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-born American motion-picture director whose films are characterized by pictorial richness and photographic craftsmanship. He is especially known for his seven films...
American director
William Wellman was an American film director whose more than 80 movies included Hollywood classics of documentary-like realism and who was ranked as an action director alongside Howard Hawks and John...
American director
Mitchell Leisen was an American costume designer, art director, and film and television director. He was considered a “woman’s director” by dint of the affinity he demonstrated for actresses. His motion...
American director
Don Siegel was an American motion-picture director who specialized in action-packed films with tightly constructed narratives. He frequently worked with actor Clint Eastwood, and their collaborations include...
Iranian-born American artist
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born American artist whose photography, video, and feature films investigate how women find freedom in repressive societies. About her work, Neshat stated: “Everything I’ve...
American director
John Sturges was an American director best known for taut war movies and westerns. His films include such classics as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963)....