Joel and his younger brother Ethan Coen are the filmmaking duo responsible for movies like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men. He's married to actress Frances McDormand.

Joel left high school in Minnesota early to attend Simon's Rock College, later moving to Manhattan to study film at NYU, and in 1984 made his filmmaking debut along with Ethan with their dark comedy Blood Simple (which brought Coen and McDormand together). The duo followed up with Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing, and, a year later, their dark comedy Barton Fink earned them the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The brothers' first picture aimed at mainstream audiences, 1994's The Hudsucker Proxy, was a critical and commercial disappointment, but they rebounded mightily with 1996's Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The Coens directed a string of doozies in the early '00s-The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, Ladykillers-but returned to glory with their rapturously received No Country For Old Men, which won the Oscar for Best Picture and yielded the brothers their first Oscar for Best Director, Burn After Reading, and True Grit.

Although Joel gets credited as director and Ethan as producer, it's widely known that the pair write, direct, and produce their movies in tandem. (They also edit their films together under the alias "Roderick Jaynes.") [Image via Getty]