The Ride of His Life

Cameron has made a career out of combining all three. Artsy and technologically inclined, he has managed to fire up quite a mystique. Ask him anything about the art or craft of moviemaking and he'll make bold verbal forays. But ask about his private life and you'll be met with stony silence.

Here's what a persistent person will come up with anyway: James Cameron was born Aug. 16, 1954, in Kapuskasing, Canada, just north of Niagara Falls. The oldest of five children, his parents seemed to provide the combination of art and science that resulted in his unique film sensibilities. Cameron's father was an electrical engineer who worked for a paper mill, and his mother was a nurse and an avid painter in her spare time.

That talent blossomed as well in her son, then, as now, an extraordinary artist. "This is the kid who won all the Halloween-window-painting contests,” says his bother Mike. "Everybody else would do some dumb pumpkin. He would do this wild, high-energy thing that had depth and proportion and was marvelous to see.”

Mike, one of three Cameron boys, says growing up with Jim meant adventure was always just around the corner: “We always had some wild rocket to build or were fashioning some gadget out of junk that was found in the storeroom. His imagination knew no bounds.”

Mike recalls one instance when the brothers built a hot-air balloon out of dry-cleaning bags. “It shimmered and had multiple candles on it to make it fly, and we were chasing it on our Sting Ray bikes. It actually got the fire department out after it and made it into the paper as a UFO,” the younger sibling says with a chuckle.

Growing up in that relatively remote region on the banks of the Chippewa Creek, the Cameron kids looked largely to nature for their entertainment, and James Cameron's love of scuba diving dates back to those childhood days. In fact, Cameron's enthusiasm for motorcycles, guns and heavy equipment still seems steeped in boyish wonder.

Today, he organizes weekend motorcycling rides with friends such as producer Andy Vajna and actors Tom Arnold and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He supports the Coral Reef Research marine-study group and orchestrates diving expeditions to remote corners of the world for himself and a small circle of seafaring friends, including Bill Paxton, Sigourney Weaver, brother Mike and producer Gale Anne Hurd, to whom he was married in the early '80s.

After their divorce, Cameron was briefly wed to action director Kathryn Bigelow, another formidable female. He has a daughter by actress Linda Hamilton, his current flame. "He's not afraid of strong women,” says screenwriter William Wisher, a close friend of Cameron's since the family moved to Brea in Orange County, Calif., when Jim was 17.

There, Cameron studied physics and English at Fullerton College, doing odd jobs (including driving a truck) to keep hours flexible enough to support his writing habit.

Cameron had harbored the desire to be a filmmaker since seeing Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey” at age 14. His deliverance from a career as a marine biologist came from the unlikeliest quarter: a consortium of dentists who wanted to produce a movie as a tax shelter. Cameron penned a sci-fi adventure called "Xenogenesis.” “It's a real word,” he says. "It means 'of alien origin.'" He received $25,000 to lens a segment of the film that could be used to raise further capital.

Though that project never reached its natural conclusion, the reel – along with a few models he had built – landed Cameron a job at Roger Corman's New World Pictures. And the rest, as they say, is history.