Amy Heckerling

Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American film director. She is an alumna of both New York University and the American Film Institute. She has had a commercially successful career with films including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, European Vacation, Look Who's Talking, and Clueless.

Heckerling is a recipient of AFI's Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal celebrating her creative talents and artistic achievements.

Personal life

Heckerling was born in The Bronx, New York, to a bookkeeper mother and a Certified Public Accountant father. She had a Jewish upbringing and remembers that the apartment building where she spent her early childhood was full of Holocaust survivors. "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Both of her parents worked full-time so she frequently moved back and forth from her home in the Bronx, where Heckerling claims she was a latchkey kid sitting at home all day watching television, to her grandmother's home in Brooklyn which she enjoyed much better. Here, she frequented Coney Island and stayed up watching films all night with her grandmother. At this time Heckerling loved television, where she watched numerous cartoons and old black and white movies. Her favorites were gangster movies, musicals and comedies. She had a particular fondness for James Cagney.