Robert Zemeckis

Born May 14, 1951, Zemeckis won a Student Academy Award at USC in 1973 for A Field of Honor, then spent the late '70s and early '80s directing comedies that showed flashes but didn't break through - I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars - until Romancing the Stone in 1984 proved he could carry a hit. The Back to the Future trilogy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit turned him into Hollywood's go-to architect for effects-driven spectacle that still felt human, a balance he struck again with Forrest Gump in 1994, which won him the Best Director Oscar. He's since toggled between grounded drama - Contact, Cast Away, Flight - and motion-capture experiments like The Polar Express and Beowulf, often with composer Alan Silvestri at his side and Tom Hanks in front of the camera. One of the few filmmakers to win Academy Awards for both student and professional work, he remains the rare technician whose tricks serve the story instead of swallowing it.