Tim Burton

Guide Note

Director Tim Burton started his career as an animator, and brings an other-worldly, imaginative, and frequently gothic sensibility to even his live-action films. The man behind such grim (though frequently comic) visions such as Beetlejuice, The Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow, Burton is regarded as one of contemporary American filmmaking's premiere visual stylists.

He has a son and a daughter with actress Helena Bonham Carter, with whom he also lives. Burton has cast the British star in a number of his films, including 2007's Sweeney Todd.

Fast Facts

1. Birthday: August 25, 1958
2. Birth Name: Timothy William Burton
3. Johnny Depp is godfather to his son
4. Oscar: 1 nomination
5. Frequently casts his ex-fiancee Lisa Marie in his films
6. Had planned, at various times, to direct After Hours, later directed by Martin Scorsese, and The Fly, later directed by David Cronenberg

As a boy, Burton says he was largely influenced by low-budget B-movies of the 1950s and '60s, particularly those starring Vincent Price, who inspired one of his early short films and with whom he would collaborate on Edward Scissorhands. The stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen was also a considerable influence on the young Burton, as he would move into the format himself years later.

A skilled artist from an early age, Burton won a scholarship from The Walt Disney Company to study at the California Institute of the Arts. He worked as a cell painter on the Ralph Bakshi adaptation of JRR Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings before accepting a job as an animator apprentice with Disney.

While unhappily working at Disney, Burton designed the characters and wrote the poem that became the wildly-popular Burton-produced animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Burton's first short film as a director was 1982's stop-motion animated Vincent, about a troubled young boy who acts out his own grim fantasies. He followed it up with the live-action short Frankenweenie, which caught the attention of comedian Paul Reubens, who then hired Burton to direct his first feature film - Pee-wee's Big Adventure. The film marked his first collaboration between Burton and former Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman, who would come to write the music for the majority of Burton's films.

More big studio films followed, including the first two films in Warner Bros. wildly-successful Batman franchise. Burton's 2007 project, Sweeney Todd, earned Burton the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and the film won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Art Direction.