Born in 1936, writer-director Philip Kaufman grew up on the northside of Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago. After a year at Harvard Law School, he returned to the University of Chicago to begin a Master's degree program in history. 

In 1960, he relocated his family to the San Francisco Bay area. Kaufman found himself enthralled by the new wave of filmmaking and filmmakers breaking over the continent, and soon after, the family headed for Europe. 

Returning to Chicago in 1962, Kaufman met Anais Nin at the University of Chicago. He spent the day with her, telling her the scenario of a film he was contemplating, and Nin encouraged him to become a filmmaker. He took her advice. In 1963 he turned an unfinished novel he was working on into his first film, the mystical comedy, Goldstein. Starring members of the Second City comedy troupe and shot on a shoestring budget, the picture won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. In 1965 Kaufman wrote and directed Fearless Frank, a comic book satire starring Jon Voight in his film debut. Two years later Kaufman was in Hollywood, under contract to Universal. 

There he wrote and directed The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, starring Robert Duvall and Cliff Robertson, in 1971. He then directed the The White Dawn (Paramount) in 1973, before developing the original story for Raiders of the Lost Ark with George Lucas and writing the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. Moving to San Francisco in 1977, Kaufman directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, an updating of the Don Siegel classic, winning various science fiction awards. In 1979, after his son Peter found Richard Price's comic gang novel The Wanderers, Kaufman and his wife, Rose, wrote a screenplay based on the book, which Kaufman directed.

In 1983 Kaufman earned both Writers Guild and Directors Guild Award nominations for his adaptation of Tom Wolfe's best-selling The Right Stuff, and the film went on to receive four Academy Awards. 

His next film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, , starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche, earned Kaufman another Writers Guild nomination, an Academy Award nomination and a British Academy Award in 1988. The adaptation of Czech writer Milan Kundera's novel of the same name won the Best Picture Award of the National Society of Film Critics, who named Kaufman Best Director. He also received the international Orson Welles Award for Best Filmmaker in 1989. 

In 1990 Kaufman made Henry & June, an adaptation of Anais Nin's memoir of Henry Miller and his wife June. The film which starred Fred Ward, Uma Thurman and Maria de Medeiros, was written by Philip and Rose Kaufman and produced by Peter Kaufman. 

Kaufman next directed Rising Sun in 1993, starring Sean Connery, Wesley Snipes, Harvey Keitel and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa. Kaufman co-wrote the screenplay, based on the bestseller by Michael Crichton. 

Kaufman's latest film, Quills, will premiere this fall, 2000. A tale about the Marquis de Sade, it stars Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Michael Caine and Joaquin Phoenix. 

Philip Kaufman has been honored with retrospectives at the Sundance Film Festival, the Cambridge, England Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, the Wine Country Film Festival and the Taos Talking Picture Festival, where he received the Howard Hawks Storyteller Award. This year Mr. Kaufman will be honored with tributes at the Institut Lumiere in France and the American Film Institute.

Credit: philipkaufman.com