George Lucas is a filmmaker, producer, and writer known for Star Wars. He attended USC with Randal Kleiser and produced short films. Lucas is friends with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and owns Lucasfilm. He was married to Marcia Lou Griffin and has three adopted daughters. He has been nominated for four Academy Awards and won two awards.
George Walton Lucas, Jr. was born on May 14, 1944 in Modesto, California. George Lucas attended the University of Southern California, one of the first in the country to have a motion picture arts department. Lucas’s college roommate was Randal Kleiser, who directed films like Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Together, they produced a number of short films for their undergraduate program, including an early version of THX 1138, which was George Lucas’ first feature film.
During his career, George Lucas became friends with several big names in the film industry, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, as a producer and special effects coordinator on films such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Labyrinth (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988).
George Lucas, however, is best known as the director and writer of Star Wars. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope debuted in 1977 with pretty low expectations. So low, in fact, that the studios agreed to give George Lucas ownership of the licensing rights to all Star Wars films. This proved to be an incredible move for Lucas. According to Forbes magazine, George Lucas’ fortune is estimated to be around 3.5 billion US dollars (USD), much of which is a result of the success of Star Wars.
In recent years, George Lucas has stepped back from his typical directorial role and now focuses on film production, which gives him control over the technical details. George Lucas is the creator of Lucasfilm, which has developed high-tech special effects for many films, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. The highly successful Pixar Animation Studios is also the brainchild of George Lucas.
George Lucas was married for 14 years to fellow USC student Marcia Lou Griffin. A successful film editor in her own right, she won an Academy Award for her work on Star Wars. Griffin has three adopted daughters, two of whom were adopted after her divorce in 1993.
George Lucas has been nominated for four Academy Awards (1974 and 1978) and won an Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1991 and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 2005.
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