Mike Newell is one of the biggest British director's at work in Hollywood at the moment, and enjoying huge success to boot.
He is back in the director's chair this week with his new blockbuster Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is based on the popular computer game.
After studying at Magdalene College, Cambridge he went on to a three year training course at Granda Television were he learnt his craft, he had hoped to go into the theatre.
However Newell found himself in television and he soon had gangster series Spindoe and Big Breadwinner Hog under his belt.
He went onto co-direct the mini series The Man From Haven before moving to the BBC to directed episodes of Wessex Tales.
By the late seventies he had moved into movies with The Man In The Iron Mask, which was made for TV, an adaptation of The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas.
In 1980 he moved into feature films when he directed horror movie The Awakening, which was based on Bram Stoker's 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, before moving onto Bad Blood.
Critical Acclaim came his way in 1985 with British movie Dance With A Stranger and starred Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett.
In the repressed atmosphere of 1950s Britain, Marilyn Monroe-lookalike Ruth Ellis is the ultimate bad girl. A divorced, former prostitute, Ellis now works as a hostess in a nightclub where she meets dissolute rich boy David Blakeley.
Handsome, insouciant and cruel, Blakeley is a representative of the haute-bourgeois world Ellis longs to enter. Consumed with desire for a man and a social standing she can never possess, Ellis' obsessive relationship with Blakeley spirals ever deeper into despair and violence.
For his movie of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK Newell won the Award of the Youth at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.
Throughout the late eighties he continued to make a name for himself with movies such as Enchanted April and Into The West.
But it would be Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 that remains his biggest success.
Charles (Hugh Grant) is a confirmed British bachelor with a colourful romantic background who meets the perfect woman, Carrie (Andie MacDowell), at a friend's wedding.
However, Charles's hopes of romance are dashed when Carrie announces she must return to America the next morning.
The two continue to cross paths at other people's weddings, never finding each other at a time when both are single.
As all of Charles's friends find love, he's left wondering if he will ever be the one going to the altar.
Penned by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant, Four Weddings and a Funeral went on to become the biggest grossing movie in British cinema history and made over $240 million at the global box office.
The film went onto be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, losing out to Forest Gump.
After the success of the movie he went on to work with some of cinema's biggest names, in the form of Al Pacino, Johnny Depp and John Cusack, as he made Donnie Brasco and Pushing Tin at the end of the nineties.
After Pushing tin he took a break from directing and moved into producing as he worked on Traffic, High Fidelity and I Capture The Castle.
It was 2003 when he finally returned to directed as he worked with Oscar winner Julia Roberts on Mona Lisa Smile.
The movie was set in 1953, a time when women's roles were rigidly defined, free-spirited, novice art history professor Katherine Watson begins teaching at the prestigious all-female Wellesley College, which despite its academic reputation, is an environment where success is measured by 'how well' the students marry.
Encouraging these women to strive for a more enlightened future, Watson challenges the administration and inspires her students to look beyond the image of what is, and consider the possibilities of what could be, contrary to popular belief.
But it was 2005 when Newell got his first taste of the big budget blockbuster when he helmed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
It was the fourth instalment of the successful franchise and was met well by the critics upon it's release.
And it was the biggest box office hit for Newell as it went on to take over $895 million worldwide.
After failing to find success with Love In A Time of Cholera in 2007 Newell returns to the blockbuster with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Working alongside producer Jerry Bruckheimer the movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley and is based on the hit computer game.
A rogue prince named Dastan (Gyllenhaal) reluctantly joins forces with a mysterious princess Tamina (Arterton) and together, they race against dark forces to safeguard an ancient dagger capable of releasing the Sands of Time, a gift from the gods that can reverse time and allow its possessor to rule the world.
Hoping to enjoy the success that other Bruckheimer franchises have received, I'm thinking Pirates of the Caribbean, could we have a new franchise on out hands?
As for Newell he has been linked with The Elfstones of Shannara and The Box of Delights.
Prince of Persia; The Sands of Time is out now.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Mike Newell