Alfonso Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón Orozco, born on 28 November 1961 in Mexico City, is a Mexican filmmaker who has won four Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, seven BAFTAs, and a Golden Lion, and has been nominated for a Grammy. He grew up with a sister named Christina and two brothers: Carlos, also a filmmaker, and Alfredo, a conservation biologist. His father, Alfredo Cuarón, was a doctor specializing in nuclear medicine, and his mother, Cristina Orozco, worked as a pharmaceutical biochemist.

Cuarón studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and later filmmaking at the same university’s Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos. There he met director Carlos Marcovich and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and together they made his first short film, Vengeance Is Mine. He was expelled from the school and feared he would never find work in the film industry.

1990–1999: Rise to prominence

Cuarón began his career on Mexican television, first as a technician and later as a director. This led to assistant director roles on films such as La Gran Fiesta (1985), Gaby: A True Story (1987), and Romero (1989). His feature debut was the 1991 romantic comedy Sólo con tu pareja, about a womanizing businessman tricked into thinking he has AIDS. Cuarón wrote, produced, directed, and co-edited the film, which became a major hit in Mexico.

After that, Sydney Pollack hired him to direct an episode of the neo-noir series Fallen Angels in 1993, titled "Murder, Obliquely," starring Laura Dern, Alan Rickman, and Diane Lane. His first U.S. feature was A Little Princess (1995), an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, which earned two Academy Award nominations for cinematography and production design. He then directed a modernized version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1998), starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert De Niro. The film received mixed reviews but earned $55 million worldwide against a $25 million budget.

2000–2009: Career breakthrough and success

In 2001, Cuarón returned to Mexico to make Y tu mamá también, a road comedy about two teenagers and an older married woman. The film’s open sexuality and political asides made it an international hit and critical success, earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay (shared with his brother Carlos) and the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. In 2004, he directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the series.

Though some fans criticized his creative liberties, author J.K. Rowling called it her personal favorite of the series, and critics received it better than the first two films. Cuarón later directed the dystopian drama Children of Men (2006), the science fiction drama Gravity (2013), and the semi-autobiographical drama Roma (2018). Gravity and Roma each won him the Academy Award for Best Director; he also won Best Film Editing for Gravity and Best Cinematography for Roma.