Director: Amy Heckerling

Amy Heckerling directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High at twenty-eight, and it remains one of the few American teen films that treats abortion, sexual pressure and part-time work as the actual subject instead of as background to a romance.

Clueless, adapted from Emma, invented a vocabulary that entered general use and has aged better than almost any comedy of the 1990s. Its warmth is the difference: the film likes its characters, which was not the norm for satire at the time.

Between them she made Look Who’s Talking, which was enormously successful and is the film she is least associated with.