Peter Cowie began writing about the cinema while at Cambridge University in the early 1960s. In 1963 he founded the annual "International Film Guide", which he edited for four decades. His more than thirty books include studies of Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, and Akira Kurosawa, as well as more than a dozen commentaries on classic films for The Criterion Collection, and has lectured in four continents.