Eadweard Muybridge is often called the father of the motion picture because of his photographic studies of animal motion. He began his career as a landscape photographer, and always considered himself more an artist than a scientist, altho...

Karl Friedrich May was a popular German writer, noted mainly for adventure novels set in the American Old West, (best known for the characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand) and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East (with Kara B...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in...

The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis, were among the earliest filmmakers. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English.) Their father, Charles Antoine Lumière (1840-1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for...

Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomen...

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any othe...

Cecil Blount DeMille was an Academy Award-winning American film director. He was famous in the first half of the 20th century, known for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies. DeMille directed dozens of silent films, including Param...

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. Chaplin became a worldwide icon through his screen persona "the Tramp" and i...

Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse, La Roue, and the monumental Napoléon. He worked in the cinema from 1909, finally winning acclaim with Mater do...

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one...

Friedrich Anton Christian Lang was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metr...

Otto James Messmer was an American animator, best known for his work on the Felix the Cat cartoons and comic strip produced by the Pat Sullivan studio. The extent of Messmer's role in the creation and popularity of Felix is a matter of o...

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first class honours degree in English literature. The aut...

John Ford was an Irish-American film director. He was famous for both his Westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath....