George Walton Lucas Jr. is an American filmmaker, who is best known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX.
Gatekeepers News reports that Lucas served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.
Early Life
Born on May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California, Lucas is the son of Dorothy Ellinore Lucas (mother) and George Walton Lucas Sr. (father).
His family attended Disneyland during its opening week in July 1955, and Lucas would remain enthusiastic about the park. Lucas was interested in comics and science fiction, including television programs such as the Flash Gordon serials.
Early Career
Lucas saw many inspiring films in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87, cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque’s cinéma vérité 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra.
He fell in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm non-story non character visual tone poems and cinéma vérité with such titles as Look at Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, Filmmaker, and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that created emotions purely through non-narrative structures.
He is one of history’s most financially successful filmmakers and is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster. Lucas has been nominated for four Academy Awards.
Lucas’ films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation.
After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1967, Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 (1971), based on his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure.
His next work as a writer-director was American Graffiti (1973), inspired by his youth in the early 1960s in Modesto, California, and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm. The film was critically and commercially successful and received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture.
His next film, the epic space opera Star Wars (1977), had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon.
He produced and co-wrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). In 1997, Lucas re-released the original Star Wars trilogy as part of a Special Edition featuring several modifications; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He returned to directing with a Star Wars prequel trilogy comprising Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), and Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). Lucas last collaborated on the CGI-animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020), the war film Red Tails (2012), and the CGI film Strange Magic (2015).
Lucas has largely retired from filmmaking since he sold his Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 for $4.1 billion in stock and cash. He is now focused on philanthropy as his charitable family foundation has more than $1 billion in assets.
Personal Life
In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin. They adopted a daughter, Amanda Lucas, in 1981, and later divorced in 1983. Lucas subsequently adopted two more children as a single parent: daughter Katie Lucas, born in 1988, and son Jett Lucas, born in 1993. His three eldest children all appeared in the three Star Wars prequels, as did Lucas himself.
Lucas began dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments and chair of DreamWorks Animation, in 2006. Lucas and Hobson announced their engagement in January 2013 and married on June 22, 2013, at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. They have one daughter together, born via surrogate in August 2013.
Net Worth
According to Forbes, Lucas’ net worth is $5.1B as of today, April 19, 2023, making him the 550th richest man.
