A jack-of-all-trades British film director best known for his epic adventures, Ken Annakin was born in Yorkshire, England, on Aug. 10, 1914, and spent time living in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. During World War II, he worked as an assistant camera operator for a company that made training films for the Royal Air Force, and later went on to direct his own war propaganda films.

Annakin's best-known films include the Disney adventure Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and the World War II classic Battle of the Bulge (1965), a star-studded drama featuring Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas.

Annakin also earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing the script to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) and directed Charlton Heston in an adaptation of Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1972). He died on April 22, 2009, at the age of 94.