GuillemMedina · CC BY-SA 4.0

William Friedkin directed The French Connection, which won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and followed it two years later with The Exorcist — a horror film taken seriously enough to earn him a Best Director nomination. A defining figure of the gritty, director-driven New Hollywood of the 1970s, he kept working for five decades, closing his career with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, released after his death in 2023.