Lucas, George

Lucas, George (1944- ), American film director and producer, born in Modesto, California. His career began with his prize-winning student film THX-1138 (1965), a science-fiction story he reworked for his feature-directing debut in 1971. In 1973, with the backing of his friend, the American film producer Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas made American Graffiti, an evocative 1960s nostalgia piece.

Lucas’s next film, Star Wars (1977), revolutionized the commercial film industry. A science-fiction adventure that almost every studio in Hollywood had turned down, it took popular culture by storm and redefined the nature of the screen spectacle. After Star Wars, Lucas retired from directing, though he served as executive producer for the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), as well as for the popular Indiana Jones series directed by Steven Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). In 1975 Lucas started Industrial Light and Magic, a company that creates special visual and audio effects (see Special Effects) for films and television.

In 1995 Lucas announced that he was planning a second trilogy of films as a prequel to the first Star Wars series; in 1997 the release of digitally enhanced versions of the original three films was a runaway box-office success. The prologue to Star Wars is famously entitled Part IV so the release of the first of the three long-awaited prequels to Star Wars in the summer of 1999, The Phantom Menace, starring Liam Neeson and marking Lucas's return to directing, led to fans queuing for months for tickets to the premiere amid intense media speculation and dissection of the cultural phenomenon that the Star Wars series has become. Lucas also directed the second and third instalments Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).