Martin Kraft · CC BY-SA 4.0

Invented the modern blockbuster with Jaws and then spent forty years proving he could do the other thing too. Schindler's List, which he shot in black and white and refused payment for, brought the Holocaust into mainstream cinema for an audience that had largely been spared thinking about it; he used the proceeds to found the Shoah Foundation, which has recorded over fifty thousand survivor testimonies. Bullied for being Jewish as a child in Arizona, he has said he spent years wishing he were not.