The illegitimate son of a Swedish farmer and his housekeeper, Dreyer spent his early years in Danish foster homes before being adopted by a strict Lutheran family. He became a journalist in 1910, and entered films as a title writer, then scriptwriter and eventually director. His first film showed little promise or talent, but he found his mature style very quickly, and by the late 1920s he was hailed as the greatest director ever to emerge from Danish cinema. But his reputation as an artist was matched by his reputation as a fanatical perfectionist, and his career was dogged by problems with the financing of his films, which led to large gaps in his output - and after the critics, too, denounced Vampyr (1932), he returned to journalism in 1932, and became a cinema manager in 1952 - though he still made features up to the mid- 1960s, a few years before his death. His films are typically slow, intense studies of human psychology, usually of people undergoing extreme personal or religious crises.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 265-273. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.