Luis Buñuel

Born in Spain in 1900, Luis Buñuel Portolés made his name in the 1920s surrealist movement, collaborating with Salvador Dalí on Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or - two films that became instant avant-garde landmarks. He spent 1947 to 1960 in Mexico directing grounded melodramas like Los Olvidados and Él, honing a craft that would later fuse with his surrealist instincts. The shift came with Viridiana in 1961, a morally knotted critique of the Franco regime that won the Palme d'Or, and continued through The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the latter taking the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972. By the time That Obscure Object of Desire closed his career in 1977, he'd collected five Cannes prizes, two Berlins, a BAFTA, an Academy Award, and two Nobel Prize in Literature nominations. He died in 1983, having turned surrealism from a movement into a method - and used it to interrogate power until the end.