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• Australian director Peter Weir was part of the Syndey filmmaking collective Ubu Films, which also included Phillip Noyce. Among his best-known films are Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show. Production will begin in March 2009 for Weir's latest project, The Way Back.

• Fast Facts:

  1. Born: August 21, 1944 in Sydney, Australia
  2. Birth Name: Peter Lindsay Weir
  3. Spouse: Wendy Stites
  4. Nominated for Oscar for Best Director 5 times, but has never won

• Film Career

  Weir started his career as a production assistant for Australian TV. After directing some documentary shorts and a segment for the anthology film Three to Go, he made his debut feature, the 1974 cult classic The Cars That Ate Paris. He followed this up with Picnic at Hanging Rock, an ambiguous, unsettling look at schoolgirls lost in the Australian wilderness.

  Weir started working in the American film industry in 1985, directing two films with Harrison Ford: Witness, about a murder in an Amish community, and The Mosquito Coast, about an eccentric inventor who moves his family to South America. He has since made a number of Hollywood films, including the box office hits Dead Poets Society and Green Card, and the 2003 naval adventure The Far Side of the World with Russell Crowe.

  Weir has directed 5 actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Linda Hunt, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Rosie Perez and Ed Harris. Hunt eventually won Best Supporting Actress for The Year of Living Dangerously, in which she played a male character.

• Related Mahalo Pages

  The Truman Show | Harrison Ford | Viggo Mortensen | Robin Williams | Jeff Bridges | Rosie Perez | John Turturro | Jim Carrey | Russell Crowe | Picnic at Hanging Rock | The Year of Living Dangerously | Witness | Dead Poets Society | The Truman Show | The Far Side of the World

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