As well as giving the world Keanu Reeves in the first ever homoerotic bank heist/surfer movie, Kathryn Bigelow, 59, is the first woman to win the Oscar for best director in the 82 years of the Academy award's history.
Fending off competition from ex-husband James Cameron's multimillion-pound sci-fi extravaganza Avatar, her low-budget war movie The Hurt Locker won six prizes at the Academy awards in 2010.
Bigelow is known for eschewing genres most associated with female directors – instead striding determinedly in male-dominated territory with her action movies, police thrillers and even a vampire/western hybrid. It's an odd route for someone who started out as a painter and conceptual artist, but her fans say she has always refused to make movies that would simply make her money – turning down high school comedies for grittier fare. Nor does she take the easy way out when filming – the Hurt Locker, which follows a bomb-disposal squad in Iraq, was shot in the Jordanian desert, without US studio backing and with unknown actors in the lead roles. She's been criticised for her attitude to gender – one critic said she masquerades "as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but film-making soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity" – and for films often entirely focused on men. While Sigourney Weaver claimed she only won her Oscar because she was a woman.
In receiving her Oscar, she said she longed for the day when the fact that she was female would be a moot point, but acknowledged her barrier-breaking role: "I hope I'm the first of many . . . I'm ever grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female film-maker and have them feel that the impossible is possible and never give up on your dream."