Age: 61
male
Guillermo del Toro Gómez (Spanish: [ɡiˈʝeɾmo ðelˈtoɾo]; born 9 October 1964) is a Mexican filmmaker, author, and artist. His work has been characterized by a strong connection to fairy tales, gothicism, and horror, often blending the genres to infuse visual or poetic beauty into the grotesque. He has had a lifelong fascination with monsters, which he considers symbols of great power. He is known for pioneering dark fantasy in the film industry and using insectile and religious imagery, his themes of Catholicism, and celebrating imperfection, underworld motifs, practical special effects, and dominant amber lighting. Throughout his career, del Toro has shifted between Spanish-language films—such as Cronos (1993), The Devil's Backbone (2001), and Pan's Labyrinth (2006)—and English-language films, including Mimic (1997), Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004) and its sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army(2008), Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015), The Shape of Water (2017), Nightmare Alley (2021), and Pinocchio (2022). As a producer or writer, he worked on the films The Orphanage (2007), Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010), The Hobbit film series (2012–2014), Mama (2013), The Book of Life (2014), Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), and The Witches (2020). In 2022, he created the Netflix anthology horror series Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, featuring a collection of classical horror stories. With Chuck Hogan, he co-authored The Strain trilogy of novels (2009–2011), which was later adapted into a comic book series (2011–15) and a live-action television series (2014–17). With DreamWorks Animation and Netflix, he created the animated franchise Tales of Arcadia, which includes the series Trollhunters (2016–18), 3Below (2018–19), and Wizards (2020) and the sequel film Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans (2021). Del Toro is close friends with fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, collectively known as "The Three Amigos of Mexican Cinema". He has received several awards, including three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Daytime Emmy Award, and a Golden Lion. He was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018, and he received a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019.
Elisabeth is a Viennese, German-language musical commissioned by the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), with book/lyrics by Michael Kunze and music by Sylvester Levay. Based on the tragic life and death of legendary Austrian Empress, Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi") wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I. It is narrated from beyond the grave by Luigi Lucheni, the Italian anarchist who assassinated her in 1898. Elisabeth recounts the enthralling tale of her fatal, lifelong love affair with Death, heralding the decline of the Habsburg Empire. Focussing on Elisabeth’s struggle against the stifling constraints of imperial protocol, her determination to assert her own identity, her reaction to the tragic fate of her son, Rudolf, and her morbidly romantic, lifelong love affair with Death–who is here presented as a dashing and darkly charming seducer. For more than three decades now, ELISABETH has been playing in a class of its own: since its world premiere in 1992 at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, the musical has been translated into seven languages and seen by over ten million spectators worldwide, making it the most successful German-language musical of all time.
