Who is he?
Denmark's nuttiest filmmaker. Oh, and Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes.

For what?
Dancer in the Dark, a bizarre musical starring Best Actress winner Björk as a blind Czech immigrant to the US, who goes to the gallows for a crime she didn't commit, but not before indulging in some Busby Berkeley-style song-and-dance routines.

Universally hailed as a work of genius, etc?
Not quite. While the jury obviously loved it, the critics were poleaxed, one calling it 'less Pennies From Heaven than Springtime for Hitler', while others bandied about words like 'ridiculous', 'terrible' and 'lamentable'. Meanwhile, von Trier accused Björk of being 'a mad woman' and eating her costume in a fit of rage before storming off the set. Not to be outdone, Björk summarily announced that the experience had been 'so intense' that she'd never make another film again.

Jeepers! Is this the first time old Lars has courted controversy?
Far from it. Pretty much all of von Trier's movies have trod the genius/ shite thin line: take Breaking the Waves, in which Emily Watson's simpleton prostituted herself in the belief - justified, as it turned out - that it would cure her crippled husband; The Idiots, made under the no-frills Dogme rules, which von Trier drew up (and promptly renounced by using 100 digital cameras for Dancer), in which a wacky commune faked mental illness in order to live a purer life, and indulged in real-time orgies and penetration scenes to boot; and his TV hospital soap The Kingdom, sort of ER meets Twin Peaks, in which spirits of dead girls haunted the lifts, and interns gave birth to devil-children.

So, like a former prince of Denmark, he likes to put an antic disposition on?
Something like that. He's known to get naked himself when filming nude scenes, believed when young that if household objects weren't placed in certain places there would be a nuclear holocaust, and countered a pathological fear of flying by driving down to Cannes in his VW camper van.

And for his next trick?
He's planning a 'full-on porn movie' with his Dancer in the Dark co-star Catherine Deneuve; sensibly, she's 'rewriting a few scenes before I commit'.