PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: screenwriting
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, 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 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 author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
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...
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...
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 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 author
After his debut in 1985 with the novel Less Than Zero, American writer Bret Easton Ellis was declared by many critics as the “voice of a generation.” Ellis’s darkly sardonic first novel captured the jaded...
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 author
Joan Didion was an American novelist and essayist known for her lucid prose style and incisive depictions of social unrest and psychological fragmentation. She was one of the foremost voices of New Journalism,...
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 and author
John Waters is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter who is known for his boundary-pushing movies that repulsed many critics and viewers when he first came on the scene in the late 1960s...
American actor
Owen Wilson’s path to Hollywood comedy stardom began with what he once described as a “little idea” that he cooked up in his early 20s with Wes Anderson, his college friend and lifelong collaborator. That...
American writer
Larry Kramer was an American playwright, screenwriter, and gay rights activist whose confrontational style of advocacy, while divisive, was credited by many with catalyzing the response to the HIV/AIDS...
Indian author and activist
Arundhati Roy is an Indian author and political activist who is best known for the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her advocacy of environmental and human rights issues....
American author and director
Nicholas Ray was an American motion-picture writer and director whose reputation as one of the most expressive and distinctive filmmakers of the late 1940s and the ’50s is grounded on a clutch of stylish...
American film director, producer, and screenwriter
Blake Edwards was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter who was best known for the classic romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffiany’s (1961) as well as the comedy The Pink Panther (1963) and...
American filmmaker
Joseph L. Mankiewicz was an American producer, director, and screenwriter known for his witty, literary, urbane dialogue and memorable characters. He worked with many of Hollywood’s major stars and earned...
American director
John Frankenheimer was an American television and film director who was considered one of the most important and creatively gifted directors of the 1950s and ’60s. He was especially noted for such classic...
American director
Samuel Fuller was an American director known for his gritty action movies. Fuller left school at age 13 and became a copyboy for The New York Journal under editor Arthur Brisbane. While still in his teens,...
American director
Leo McCarey was an American director and writer who was perhaps best known for his light comedies, notably the classics Duck Soup (1933) and The Awful Truth (1937), but who also made several popular romances...
American director and screenwriter
Brian De Palma is an American motion-picture director and screenwriter best noted for his usually stylish, often graphic horror-suspense films that draw heavily on the work of director Alfred Hitchcock....
Greek director and screenwriter
Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek director and screenwriter known for his surreal films that combine absurd scenarios, striking set designs, and stories of penetrating psychological insight. Lanthimos learned...
American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor
Mel Brooks is an American film and television director, producer, writer, and actor whose motion pictures elevated outrageousness and vulgarity to high comic art. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay...
American director, producer, and screenwriter
George Lucas is an American motion-picture director, producer, and screenwriter who created several of the most popular films in history. The son of a small-town stationer and a mother who was often hospitalized...
Mexican director
Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, screenwriter, and producer who is known for imbuing horror and fantasy films with emotional and thematic complexity. His body of work, which includes Hellboy (2004),...
American screenwriter and director
James Gunn’s ability to translate the energy and inventiveness of comic books into film has made him one of the most sought-after American writer-directors in the superhero genre—one of the most lucrative...
American director
Sam Peckinpah was an American motion-picture director and screenwriter who was known for ultraviolent but often lyrical films that explored issues of morality and identity. During World War II, Peckinpah...
American actor, writer, and director
Ben Affleck is an American actor and filmmaker who has played leading roles in action, drama, and comedy films but who is perhaps more renowned for his work as a screenwriter, director, and producer. He...
American director
Preston Sturges was an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, and playwright best known for a series of hugely popular satirical comedies that he made in the early 1940s. Sturges made his mark...
Indian actor, writer, filmmaker, and politician
Kamal Haasan is an Indian actor, writer, filmmaker, and politician, admired for his varied accomplishments in South Indian cinema. He is known for his versatility and productivity, with appearances in...
American film director
Peter Bogdanovich was an American director, critic, and actor noted for his attempts to revitalize film genres of the 1930s and ’40s. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.) As...
American director, producer, and writer
Alan J. Pakula was an American motion-picture director, producer, and screenwriter who evoked exceptional performances from actors and actresses in the 16 films he directed, most notably in three dark,...
British author and scientist
Arthur C. Clarke was an English writer, notable for both his science fiction and his nonfiction. His best known works are the script he wrote with American film director Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space...
American actress, singer, director, producer
Barbra Streisand is an American singer, composer, actress, director, and producer who is considered by many to be the greatest popular singer of her generation. The first major female star to command roles...
American cartoonist, writer, animator, and director
Frank Tashlin was an American cartoonist, writer, animator, and film director who specialized in broad satirical comedies. Tashlin directed his animated cartoons like live-action films—employing a wide...
American actor, writer, and director
Paul Mazursky was an American actor, writer, and director whose films, which often explored relationships, were known for their insight, satire, and compassion. After graduating from Brooklyn College in...
American actor
W.C. Fields was an actor whose flawless timing and humorous cantankerousness made him one of America’s greatest comedians. His real-life and screen personalities were often indistinguishable, and he is...
American producer, director, and writer
Ryan Murphy is a producer, director, and writer of television and film who has built a successful and prolific career by bringing the stories of marginalized characters to the mainstream and by exploring...
American writer and director
Noah Baumbach established himself as a distinctive new voice in filmmaking with his self-aware, dialogue-heavy dramas about artists and intellectuals living in his home city of New York. Starting in 1995...
British writer
James Clavell was an Australian-born British author, director, and screenwriter best known for his popular action novels set within Asian cultures, in particular Shōgun (1975), which became an international...
American director, screenwriter, and producer
Darren Aronofsky is an American director, screenwriter, and producer known for making psychologically intense and often surreal films, including Requiem for a Dream (2000) and The Whale (2022). He was...
Pakistani author
Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indo-Pakistani writer of Urdu fiction and nonfiction whose works presented untempered depictions of the grim realities of society, including sexual violence, prostitution, murder,...
American musician, journalist, and author
James McBride is an American author and musician known for his acclaimed works of historical fiction and autobiography, including the best-selling memoir The Color of Water (1996) and the National Book...
Canadian actor and screenwriter
Seth Rogen is a Canadian comic actor and screenwriter who won over audiences as a charismatic buffoon in a number of box-office hits, including Knocked Up (2007). He later branched out into dramatic roles...