Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma
Brian De Palma, 2007
Born	Brian Russell De Palma (1940-09-11) September 11, 1940 (age 76) Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Residence	Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter
Years active	1960–present
Spouse(s)	Nancy Allen (1979–83) Gale Anne Hurd (1991–93) Darnell Gregorio-De Palma (1995–97)
Children	2

Brian Russell De Palma (born September 11, 1940) is an American film director and screenwriter. He is considered part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking.

In a career spanning over 40 years, he is best known for his suspense, psychological thriller, and crime films. He directed successful and popular films such as the supernatural horror Carrie, the erotic crime thriller Dressed to Kill, the thriller Blow Out, the crime dramas Scarface, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, and the action spy film Mission: Impossible.

De Palma, who is of Italian ancestry, is the youngest of three boys and was born in Newark, New Jersey to Vivienne (née Muti) and Anthony Federico De Palma, an orthopedic surgeon. He was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and attended various Protestant and Quaker schools, eventually graduating from Friends' Central School. When he was in high school, he built computers. He won a regional science-fair prize for a project titled "An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations".

Enrolled at Columbia as a physics student, De Palma became enraptured with the filmmaking process after viewing Citizen Kane and Vertigo. De Palma subsequently enrolled at the newly coed Sarah Lawrence College as a graduate student in their theater department in the early 1960s, becoming one of the first male students among a female population. Once there, influences as various as drama teacher Wilford Leach, the Maysles brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and Alfred Hitchcock impressed upon De Palma the many styles and themes that would shape his own cinema in the coming decades.