When J. J. Abrams was growing up he was fascinated by magic, the business of making “people watch in awe” as things disappeared and reappeared. As an adult, Jeffrey Jacob Abrams has become a successful Hollywood alchemist, turning stories into box-office gold as a writer, director and producer.

Abrams, 40 — whose television hits include Alias and Lost — is to direct the eleventh Star Trek film, barely drawing breath, it seems, from doing the same for one of this year’s blockbusters, Mission: Impossible III.

In between thinking about big movies, he is keeping at least four TV creations going and doing the daily school run for his children, Henry and Gracie, both under 8. “We’re a family,” he said recently. “My work isn’t any more important than anything else in the family.” But it clearly is not any less so, either. Even more revealing is that he counts in his job his role as a family member.

How does he make it all look so effortless? Some suggest that his trick is to take B-movie storylines, give them an A-movie gloss, then spin in plot twists. Not that it matters: he is a critics’ darling — a neat trick to pull off alongside huge commercial success. Whatever the secret, there is no doubting the appeal. Warner Bros has just signed the bespectacled, compulsive multitasker (he also composes his own scores and edits) to a six-year, £30 million deal.

The first film he directed — as an 11-year-old, using a Super-8 camera — was a horror number, The Attic. He is clearly fascinated by the darker side of cinematic life; as a teenager he wrote a fan letter to a special-effects expert and was rewarded, by return of post, with one of the tongue extensions used in The Exorcist.

This is a man who is taking success in his stride, apparently comfortable with its terrifying rewards, perhaps because his father is a producer — or perhaps because he has never failed. He wrote his first film, Taking Care of Business, at the age of 22, then knocked off Regarding Henry, which starred Harrison Ford, and Forever Young for Mel Gibson. Oh yes, then there was the hit TV series Felicity and the co-authorship of the 1998 action film Armageddon.

All is not well, however, with Star Trek, where men boldly (and baldly) go: Jean Luc Picard and his crew remain popular, but the franchise’s last outing, Enterprise, was a disaster. For Abrams, who still keeps a magic set by his desk, making Star Trek cool again may be his best trick yet.