Celebrity Birthday of the Day – July 19

Egyptian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan was born in Cairo but moved with his parents to Canada when he was only two years old. They settled in British Columbia and Egoyan moved to Toronto in his youth to study at Trinity College. It was during this time that he became interested in filmmaking after seeing the Ingmar Bergman film Persona. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Egoyan made primarily shorts, and he moved into directing episodes of television series in the later half of that decade, working on shows such as Friday the 13th: The Series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Twilight Zone. The 1990s saw Egoyan move into feature filmmaking, and he earned much acclaim for his 1994 movie Exotica. Since then, he has directed such films as The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, Ararat, Where the Truth Lies, Adoration, and Chloe. Atom Egoyan turns 53 today.