John Guillerman was born in London, of French parentage, in 1925.  After service in the RAF during the war he spent three years in France learning his trade as an assistant on documentaries and short films (Lloyd).  In the late Forties he worked on a few low budget British films - High Jinks in Society (1949) and Torment (1950) - before going to Hollywood to study film-making methods in 1950.  On his return a more positive approach was apparent in his low budget films - Miss Robin Hood (1952)and Dust and Gold (1955).  He achieved a certain amount of critical acclaim in 1957 with Town on Trial, a film that attacked English snobbery with frankness and realism.  He also showed that he was adept at intensifying the levels of suspense in the murder scenes.  In 1962 he directed Peter Sellers in the tragicomic Waltz of the Toreadors, a touching portrayal of a retired military officer still obsessed by beautiful young women.  The same year he directed Tarzan's Greatest Adventure, one of the best in the series.  His experiences on that film may have increased his interest in the Sheena project when it was offered to him over twenty years later.  His mastery of suspense showed through in The Towering Inferno (1974), despite a top-heavy cast.  His addle-brained remake of King Kong (1976) was close to disastrous and an even worse sequel, King Kong Lives (1986), confirmed for critics that he was not an auteur director, but one of the general entertainment directors who occasionally hit the mark, but more frequently miss it completely (Quinlan and Thomson).