Guillermo del Toro was born on October 9, 1964, in Guadalajara, Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother and spent most of his teenage years developing a love for horror movies and film making. He enjoyed making short films and improving his work every day while attending film school at Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos.
Del Toro is best known for incorporating horror and fantasy films with emotional and thematic complexity, but movie-making is not his only skill. He has also written/directed/produced television shows: HypaSpace (2002-2008), Miradas 2 (2004), The Strain (2014-2017), TrollHunters (2016-2018), Five Came Back (2017), 3 Below (2018-2019), and Wizards: Tales of Arcadia (2020), as well as the couch gag for the Simpsons episode: “Treehouse of Horror XXIV” (2013).
His first debut film, Dona Herlinda and her Son, premiered in 1986, and since then del Toro has focused a lot of his producing and directing projects toward Mexican television shows. He also gained a lot of accolades with his movie Cronos in 1993, which won nine Ariel Awards as well as the International Critics Week Prize at Cannes.
His movie Pan’s Labyrinth was nominated for a Foreign Language Film Academy Award. In 2018, del Toro won Oscars for Best Picture and for Best Director for his movie The Shape of Water and he has also been nominated for four Golden Globe awards, and five Academy Awards. He has also won two BAFTA Awards, a Producers Guild of America Award, a Directors Guild of America Award, six Ariel Awards, and the Golden Lion Award.
But he wasn’t always the outstanding movie mogul that we know today. In the 1980s, he formed his own company called a special effects company called Necropia, serving as a make-up artist. He spent almost ten years in that field, although he did manage to release Dona Herlinda and her Son during that time. His company created special effects were used in the 1988-90 television horror series Hora Marcada, for which del Toro wrote and directed several episodes. In 1993, he directed Cronos, which earned him a lot of attention, but before that he had also produced and directed Mexican television programs and taught film.
After directing Blade II (2002), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), del Toro was hired to direct the Hobbit films, working alongside Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, but he backed out of that project and went on to direct Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015) and The Shape of Water (2017). He was earlier turned down the opportunity to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Alien vs. Predator (2007) to concentrate on The Golden Army.
Del Toro has collaborated with Ron Perlman on a total of eight films and one television series: Hellboy, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Cronos, Pacific Rim, Blade II, and The Book of LIfe. Perlman and Guillermo also collaborated for the Beauty and the Beast television series.
While directing takes a predominant amount of time, del Toro has also written 26 books, including Pan’s Labyrinth: The labyrinth of the Faun, The Shape of Water, The Strain, The Hollow Ones, The Fall, The Night Eternal, and Untold Horror, but his genius does not stop there. He has created or assisted in movie soundtracks for Pan’s Labyrinth (Lullaby), Fernando Velázquez (Valse sur une berceuse englaise), Fernando Velázquez (Lullaby Variation), Hellboy (Stand by your Man), The Book of Life Soundtrack (The Apology Song), Pacific Rim (Main theme), and The Hobbit (The Misty Mountains Cold).
If you would like to learn more about this incredibly talented individual, you can read more about him at Total Prestige Magazine, Slashfilm.com and news.avclub.com.