Birthday: Jan 14, 1963

Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Biography: Soderbergh was born to parents with Swedish ancestry. As a child, his family migrated from Atlanta to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became dean of education at Louisiana State University (LSU). There he discovered filmaking as a teenager, directing short Super 8 mm films with equipment borrowed from LSU students. Rather than attending LSU, Soderbergh tried his luck in Hollywood after graduating from high school; he worked as a game show scorer and cue card holder to make ends meet, an... ... (read more...) d eventually found work as a freelance film editor. His big break came when he directed the Grammy-nominated concert video 9012 Live for the rock band Yes in 1985. It wasn't until Soderbergh came back to Baton Rouge that he conceived the idea for sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which he wrote in eight days. The independent film won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, became a worldwide commercial success and — along with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction — greatly contributed to the 1990s independent film revolution. Movie critic Roger Ebert dubbed Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation."