Stephen Frears is one of the most important and versatile directors of the modern cinema, equally at home in film and television, comedy and drama, Britain and America. Beginning his career as an assistant to Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, he has worthily carried on the legacy of those two great mavericks of British cinema. Just the brief selection of titles here give some hint of his range -- genre parody (Gumshoe), period drama (Dangerous Liaisons), anti-Thatcherite thriller (The Hit), modern film noir (The Grifters), not to mention his incisive observations on race, exploitation and multi-cultural Britain in Dirty Pretty Things and on the political machinations of New Labour in The Deal.He has worked with some of the best writers around -- Kureishi, Bennett, Poliakoff, Hampton, McGovern -- and he has brought to them a visual flair worthy of vintage Minnelli. Hostile to the notion of 'auteurs', Frears has nevertheless carved out a distinctive cinematic terrain of his own, featuring recurrent themes of otherness, the family, the outsider, power, politics and sexuality -- in other words, everything (to paraphrase Billy Wilder) that makes life worth living. Frears is one of those directors who makes British cinema worth fighting for.