Anna Thomas was born in Stuttgart, Germany, to a Polish family, and came to the United States as an infant immigrant. She grew up in Michigan and California, and became thoroughly Americanized. She learned to speak English and eat white bread, and in the late sixties decided to go to film school.

Away at college, she taught herself to cook: "In self defense! I needed to eat, and who could afford to go out? At the same time, I was gradually becoming a vegetarian..." She rediscovered black bread, drifted away from kielbasa, and evolved her own culinary style.

She wrote her first cookbook, The Vegetarian Epicure (Knopf, 1972) while she was a graduate student in film at The University of California at Los Angeles. It became a phenomenal success and remains a classic, universally acknowledged as the book that brought pleasure to vegetarian cooking.

A few years later, having expanded her culinary horizons through much travel and tasting of new foods, she completed her second book, The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two; it was published by Knopf in 1978. Both books have been translated into several languages, have sold in the millions in their various editions, and have remained continually in print.

But cooking and food writing remained an avocation, and Anna continued her film work. In 1973, she worked with fellow film student Gregory Nava on his master's thesis film a dramatic feature set in the middle ages. It was the beginning of a writing collaboration that has spanned more than two decades. (For more on Anna's work with food and with film, see Roger Ebert's profile of Anna.)

Anna Thomas and Gregory Nava continued to work together, and in 1975 they married. In 1977 Anna wrote, produced and directed her master's thesis film, an ambitious dramatic feature titled The Haunting of M. The turn of the century ghost story was shot in Scotland - and financed with the advance money from The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two. It played to critical acclaim at festivals and art houses.

In 1983, after several years of intense struggle, Anna co-wrote and produced El Norte, with Nava directing. "People sometimes envy me for the way I came into the publishing world," she says. "I just sent off my first cookbook manuscript, it was immediately accepted by the best publisher - and the rest, as they say, is history. But believe me, I paid my dues in the film business. El Norte was turned down by everyone in the industry. We heard "no" five hundred times before it was finally produced on a complete shoestring."

But El Norte was released in 1984 and became an instant critical and commercial success. Thomas and Nava were nominated for an Academy Award, the film collected numerous honors worldwide, and in 1995 it was elected to the National Film Archive in the Library of Congress.

Anna continued to work in the film industry, both as a producer and a writer, as she raised two sons. Christopher was born in 1984, one day after the New York premiere of El Norte, and Teddy was born in 1985. She produced A Time of Destiny for Columbia in 1986, and did a number of studio writing jobs. In the midst of her pressured work in filmmaking, Anna kept cooking - for friends, for parties, and for her children (who frequently refused to eat their vegetables, just like yours).

She returned to the independent film world in 1995 with My Family, Mi Familia, a multi-generational family story set in East L.A. which she co-wrote and produced. It was while she was preparing that film that Anna decided to write another cookbook. "I had become a very different kind of cook," she says. "I was cooking much lighter food, and my style had become both more sophisticated and - at home with my kids - much more simple. I had learned so much, expanded my palate. I wanted to put all that into a book." In 1996, The New Vegetarian Epicure was published, a menu-based cookbook with a brand new collection of recipes "for the way we live now."

And now - Anna is living in Ojai, California, where she is writing screenplays and other fiction, raising teenagers, and talking to you on her website.