Proper group actions in complex geometry

Proper group actions are ubiquitous in mathematics and have many of the attractive features of actions of compact groups. In this survey, we discuss proper actions of Lie groups on smooth manifolds. If the group dimension is sufficiently high, all proper effective actions can be explicitly determined, and our principal goal is to provide a comprehensive exposition of known classification results in the complex setting. They include a complete description of Kobayashi-hyperbolic manifolds with high-dimensional automorphism group, which is a case of special interest.