Alfonso Cuarón is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer, and editor. Some of his most famous films include A Little Princess (1995), Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Children of Men (2006), Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018).
Cuarón was born in Mexico City on November 28, 1961. His father is Alfredo Cuarón, a nuclear physicist who worked for the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency. He has two brothers: Carlos, also a filmmaker, and Alfredo, a conservation biologist. Cuarón first studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but then went on to study filmmaking at Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos. There, he partnered with classmates to make his first short film, Vengeance is Mine.
He began his career as a television technician and director in Mexico, and moved on to being an assistant director for some Latin American films. He landed his first solo directing job in 1991 with the film Sólo Con Tu Pareja. In 1995, he released A Little Princess, his first feature film directed in the United States. This catapulted him into the Hollywood spotlight, and he continued to release popular films throughout the early 2000s. His next film was a modern adaptation of Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. After this, he returned to Mexico to direct Y Tu Mamá También, one of his best-known films, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He directed the film adaptation of the third Harry Potter novel, which received wider critical acclaim than its predecessors and is still considered the most critically acclaimed film in the franchise save for the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
Cuarón has received numerous awards, notably six nominations for Academy Awards and two wins for Gravity in the categories of Best Director and Best Film Editing. For the same film, he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Director in 2014.