ohn Marcellus Huston (pronounced /ˈdʒɒn mɑrˈsɛləs ˈhjuːstən/; August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He directed a wide range of classics during the twentieth century, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952) The Misfits (1960), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
* 3 Academy Awards
* 4 Personal life
* 5 Filmography
o 5.1 Director
o 5.2 Screenwriter
o 5.3 Actor
* 6 References
* 7 External links
[edit] Early life
Huston was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston and his wife Rhea Gore, a sports reporter. Huston was of Scots-Irish descent on his father's side[1] and English and Welsh on his mother's. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, John Marcellus and Adelia (Richardson) Gore. At the age of ten, Huston suffered a serious illness which left him nearly bedridden for several years. This spurred him to pursue a full life, both intellectually and physically.
[edit] Career
John Huston
Huston began his film career as a screenwriter on films such as Juarez (1939), Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and High Sierra (1941).
Huston's films were insightful about human nature and human predicaments. They also sometimes included scenes or brief dialogue passages that were remarkably prescient concerning environmental issues that came to public awareness in the future, in the period starting about 1970; examples include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The Night of the Iguana (1964). The Misfits (1960) was written by Arthur Miller and featured an all-star cast including Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach, and was the last screen appearance of screen icons Gable and Monroe. It is well-known that Huston spent long evenings carousing in the Nevada casinos after filming, surrounded by reporters and beautiful women, gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars. Gable remarked during this time that "if he kept it up he would soon die of it."[citation needed]
After filming the documentary Let There Be Light on the psychiatric treatment of soldiers for shellshock, Huston resolved to make a film about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. The film, Freud the Secret Passion, began as a collaboration between Huston and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre dropped out of the film and requested his name be removed from the credits. Huston went on to make the film starring Montgomery Clift as Freud.
In the 1970s, he was frequently an actor in Italian films, and continued acting until the age of 80 (Momo, 1986).
Huston is also famous to a generation of fans of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth stories as the voice of the wizard Gandalf in the Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980).
Many of his films were edited by Russell Lloyd, who was nominated for an Oscar for editing The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
The six-foot-two-inch, brown-eyed director also acted in a number of films, with distinction in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) as the film's central corrupt businessman. John Huston received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1983.
[edit] Academy Awards
In 1941, Huston was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Maltese Falcon. He was nominated again and won in 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for which he also received the Best Director award.
Huston received 15 Oscar nominations in the course of his career. In fact, he is the oldest person ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar when, at 79 years old, he was nominated for Prizzi's Honor (1985). He also has the unique distinction of directing both his father Walter and his daughter Anjelica in Oscar-winning performances (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Prizzi's Honor, respectively), making the Hustons the first family to have three generations of Academy Award winners.
In addition, he also directed 13 other actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Sydney Greenstreet, Claire Trevor, Sam Jaffe, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, José Ferrer, Colette Marchand, Deborah Kerr, Grayson Hall, Susan Tyrrell, Albert Finney, Jack Nicholson and William Hickey.
[edit] Personal life
Huston was an agnostic,[2]
The wives of John Huston:
1. Dorothy Harvey - This marriage lasted 7 years and ended in 1933.
2. Lesley Black - It was during his marriage to Black that he embarked on an affair with married New York socialite Marietta FitzGerald. While her lawyer husband was helping the war effort, the pair were once rumoured to have made love so vigorously, they broke a friend's bed.[3] When her husband returned before the end of the Second World War, Huston went back to Hollywood to await Marietta's divorce. However, on a trip to Barbados she fell in love with billionaire British MP Ronald Tree, and decided to marry him instead. Huston was heartbroken, and after an affair with the fashion designer and writer Pauline Fairfax Potter, married again.
3. Evelyn Keyes - The Hustons adopted a son Pablo (from Mexico); (his affair with Fairfax Potter continued during the marriage).
4. Enrica Soma - They had two children: a daughter, Anjelica Huston, and a son, Walter Antony "Tony" Huston, now an attorney. Soma also had a daughter, Allegra Huston, as the result of an extramarital affair with John Julius Norwich; Huston treated the girl as one of his own children following Soma's death four years later.
5. Celeste Shane. In his autobiography, An Open Book, Huston refers to her as a "crocodile", and states only that if he had his life to do over, he wouldn't marry a fifth time.
All marriages ended in divorce except his fourth, to Soma. In addition to his children with Soma, he was with the author Zoe Sallis also the father of director Danny Huston.
Among his friends were Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway. According to a documentary film about Huston's life (John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick), he struck and killed a female pedestrian with his car at the corner of Gardner and Sunset in Los Angeles when he was in his late 20s. He was exonerated of wrongdoing at the follow-up inquest.
Huston visited Ireland in 1951 and stayed at Luggala, County Wicklow, the home of Garech Browne, a member of the Guinness family. He visited Ireland several times afterwards and on one of these visits he purchased and restored a Georgian home, St Clerans, of Craughwell, County Galway. He became an Irish citizen in 1964 and his daughter Anjelica attended school in Ireland at Kylemore Abbey for a number of years. A film school is now dedicated to him on the NUIG campus. Huston is also the inspiration for the 1990 film White Hunter Black Heart starring Clint Eastwood, who also directed. In addition, the character of monomanical film director Eli Cross in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is alleged to be based on Huston.
Huston was an accomplished painter who wrote in his autobiography, "Nothing has played a more important role in my life". As a young man he studied at the Smith School of Art in Los Angeles but dropped out within a few months. He later studied at the Art Students League of New York. He painted throughout his life and was particularly interested in Cubism and the American school of Synchromism. He had studios in each of his homes and owned a wide collection of art including a notable collection of Pre-Columbian art[4] In 1982 he created the label for Château Mouton Rothschild.
A heavy smoker, he suffered from emphysema in his final days. Just before his death, Huston had travelled to Newport, Rhode Island to film a small role in his son Danny's directorial debut, Mr. North (which he also co-wrote). In July of 1987 he was rushed to Charlton Memorial Hospital in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts due to complications from his emphysema. He died shortly thereafter, on August 28, 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island. Huston's old friend Robert Mitchum replaced him in the role. A few weeks before he died, Marietta visited him and his electrocardiogram "started jumping with excitement as soon as she entered the room." She was, his friends maintained, the only woman he ever really loved.[3]
Huston is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.
[edit] Filmography
Statue of John Huston, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
[edit] Director
Year Film Academy Award Nominations Academy Award Wins
1941 The Maltese Falcon 3
1942 In This Our Life
Across the Pacific
1943 Report from the Aleutians 1
1945 The Battle of San Pietro
1946 Let There Be Light
1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 4 3
Key Largo 1 1
1949 We Were Strangers
1950 The Asphalt Jungle 4
1951 The Red Badge of Courage
The African Queen 4 1
1953 Moulin Rouge 7 2
Beat the Devil
1956 Moby Dick
1957 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison 2
1958 The Barbarian and the Geisha
The Roots of Heaven
1960 The Unforgiven
The Misfits
1962 Freud the Secret Passion 2
1963 The List of Adrian Messenger
1964 The Night of the Iguana 4 1
1966 The Bible: In The Beginning 1
1967 Reflections in a Golden Eye
Casino Royale 1
1969 Sinful Davey
A Walk with Love and Death
1970 The Kremlin Letter
1972 Fat City 1
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean 1
1973 The Mackintosh Man
1975 The Man Who Would Be King 4
1979 Wise Blood
1980 Phobia
1981 Escape to Victory
1982 Annie 2
1984 Under the Volcano 2
1985 Prizzi's Honor 8 1
1987 The Dead 2
[edit] Screenwriter
* The Storm 1930 - Dir: William Wyler (written with Charles Logue, Langdon McCormick, Tom Reed & Wells Root)
* A House Divided 1931 - Dir: William Wyler (written with John B. Clymer, Olive Edens and Dale Every)
* Murders in the Rue Morgue 1932 - Dir: Robert Florey (written with Tom Reed & Dale Van Every)
* The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse 1938 - Dir: Anatole Litvak (written with John Wexley)
* Jezebel 1938 - Dir: William Wyler (written with Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, & Robert Buckner)
* High Sierra 1941 - Dir: Raoul Walsh (written with W.R. Burnett)
* The Maltese Falcon 1941 - Dir: Huston
* Sergeant York 1941 - Dir: Howard Hawks (written with Abem Finkel, Harry Chandler, & Howard Koch)
* The Killers 1946 - Dir: Robert Siodmak (written with Anthony Veiller)
* Three Strangers 1946 - Dir: Jean Negulesco (written with Howard Koch)
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948 - Dir: Huston
* Key Largo 1948 - Dir: Huston (written with Richard Brooks)
* We Were Strangers 1949 - Dir: Huston (written with Peter Viertel)
* The African Queen 1951 - Dir: Huston (written with James Agee)
* Moulin Rouge 1952 - Dir: Huston (written with Anthony Veiller)
* Beat the Devil 1953 - Dir: Huston (written with Truman Capote)
* Moby Dick 1956 - Dir: Huston (written with Ray Bradbury)
* Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison 1957 - Dir: Huston (written with John Lee Mahin)
* The Night of the Iguana 1964 - Dir: Huston (written with Anthony Veiller)
* The Man Who Would Be King 1975 - Dir: Huston (written with Gladys Hill)
* Mr. North 1988 - Dir: Danny Huston (written with Janet Roach & James Costigan)
[edit] Actor
Does not include films which he also directed
* The Cardinal (1963, dir: Otto Preminger)
* Candy (1968, director: Christian Marquand)
* Rocky Road to Dublin (Documentary) (as Interviewee, 1968, director: Peter Lennon)
* De Sade (1969, dir: Cy Endfield)
* Myra Breckinridge (1970, dir: Michael Sarne)
* Man in the Wilderness (1971, dir: Richard C. Sarafian)
* The Bridge in the Jungle (1971)
* Rufino Tamayo: The Sources of his Art (documentary) (1972, dir: Gary Conklin)
* Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973, dir: J. Lee Thompson)
* Chinatown (1974, dir: Roman Polanski)
* Breakout (1975)
* The Wind and the Lion (1975, dir: John Milius)
* Tentacles (1977, dir: Ovidio G. Assonitis)
* The Hobbit (1977, dir: Arthur Rankin, Jr., Jules Bass)
* The Greatest Battle (1978, dir: Umberto Lenzi)
* The Bermuda Triangle (1978, dir: René Cardona, Jr.)
* Angela (1978, dir: Boris Sagal)
* The Visitor (1979, dir: Giulio Paradisi)
* Winter Kills (1979, dir: William Richert)
* A Minor Miracle (1983, dir: Raoul Lomas)
* Notes from Under the Volcano (documentary) (as himself, 1984, dir: Gary Conklin)
* Lovesick (1984, dir: Marshall Brickman)
* The Black Cauldron (1985) Narrator
* Momo (1986, dir: Johannes Schaaf)
[edit] References
1. ^ http://wc.rootsweb.com
2. ^ The religion of director John Huston
3. ^ a b Running Around in High Circles
4. ^ [Art by Directors, Karl French, Granta 86, 2004, ISBN 0 90 314169 8
Monday, April 28, 2008
Otto Preminger
Otto Ludwig Preminger (5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austro–Hungarian-born American film director who moved from the theatre to Hollywood, directing over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945). In the 1950s and 1960s, he directed a number of high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with topics which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), and homosexuality (Advise and Consent, 1962). He was twice nominated for the Best Director Academy Award. He also had a few acting roles.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Theater
o 2.2 Hollywood
+ 2.2.1 Laura
o 2.3 Peak years
o 2.4 Later career
* 3 Personal life
* 4 Death
* 5 Filmography
o 5.1 Awards
* 6 References
* 7 Notes
* 8 External links
[edit] Early life
Preminger was born in 1905 in Wiznitz, a town west of Czernowitz, Northern Bukovyna, in today's Ukraine, then part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, to Markus and Josefa Preminger. Preminger's father was born in 1877 in Galicia, at a time when it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. As an Attorney General of Austria–Hungary, Markus was a proud public prosecutor on the cusp of an extraordinary career defending the interests of the Emperor Franz Josef. The couple provided a stable home life for Preminger and his brother Ingo.
"My father believed that it was impossible to be too kind or loving to a child. He never punished me. I don't think my mother agreed completely with this method but she acted, as always, according to his wishes. I adored him. I had an affectionate relationship with my mother; she was a wonderful, warm-hearted woman, but she did not really play a large part in the formation of my character. Intellectually my father influenced me more than my mother."
[citation needed]
After the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, which led to the Great War, Russia entered the war on the Serbian side, and tsarist armies began to invade Eastern Europe. Perilously close to Russia, Czernowitz was especially vulnerable. Like other refugees in flight, Markus Preminger saw Austria as a safe haven for his family. He was able to secure a job as a public prosecutor in Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria. Preminger prosecuted nationalist Serbs and Croats who had been imprisoned as suspected enemies of the Empire. When the Preminger family relocated, Otto was nearly nine, and was enrolled in a school where instruction in Catholic dogma was mandatory and Jewish history and religion had no place on the syllabus. Ingo, not yet four, remained at home. Otto was often teased by Catholic classmates and was told by his father to answer that he was Jewish when asked.[citation needed]
After a year in Graz, the decisive public prosecutor was summoned to Vienna, where he was offered an eminent position, roughly equivalent to that of the United States Attorney General. Markus was told that the position would be his only if he converted to Catholicism. In a gesture of defiance and self-assertion, Markus refused. He received the position anyway. In 1915, Markus relocated his family to Vienna, the city that Otto later claimed to have been born in. Although now working for the emperor, Markus was a government official, respectable, but not part of the highly-prized inner city. As a result, the family started their new lives with rather modest quarters. Vienna was still an imperial capital with an array of cultural offerings that tempted Otto, at ten already incurably stagestruck. Often accompanied by his maternal grandfather, Otto made regular visits, sometimes as many as three or four a week, to the Burgtheater on the Ringstrasse, where he saw a wide variety of both classical and contemporary plays.[citation needed]
[edit] Career
[edit] Theater
Preminger's first theatrical ambition was to become an actor. In his early teens, Otto was able to recite from memory many of the great monologues from the international classic repertory, and, never shy, he demanded an audience. Preminger's most successful performance in the National Library rotunda was Mark Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar. As he read, watched, and after a fashion, began to produce plays, he started to miss more and more classes of school. Austria's failing fortunes during the war had no impact on the Premingers. Markus moved his family to a more fashionable district in 1916. Throughout the war years, Otto, now often with his younger brother, continued to go to the theater and concerts, museums, and the National Library, while his attendance in school remained irregular.[citation needed]
As the war came to an end, Markus formed his own law practice. Markus instilled in both his sons a sense of fair play as well as respect for those with opposing view-points, and rather than becoming reactionary conservatives, as their privileged upbringing might seem to be foreordained, Otto and Ingo became lifelong liberal Democrats. As his father's practice continued to thrive in post-war Vienna, Otto began seriously contemplating a career in the theater. At the age of 16, he won the role of Lysander in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.[citation needed]
In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Preminger's soon-to-be mentor, Max Reinhardt, a Viennese-born director who had established his base of operation in Berlin, announced plans to establish a theatrical company in Vienna in a rundown 135-year old theater. Reinhardt's announcement was seen as a call of destiny to Preminger. He began writing to Reinhardt weekly, requesting an audition. After a few months, Preminger, frustrated, gave up, and stopped his daily visit to the post office to check for a response. Unbeknowst to him, a letter was waiting with a date for an audition Preminger had already missed by two days. Feigning illness, Preminger skipped classes and began to hover near the stage door hoping to encounter Reinhardt associate Dr. Stefan Hock, begging for another audition. The day finally came when Hock took Preminger directly inside to Reinhardt and his associates. Preminger was immediately accepted.[citation needed]
Preminger explained to his father that a career in theater was not just a ploy to excuse himself from school. This was a way of life, and it was the only one he wanted. In order to obtain his father's full blessing, Preminger finished school and completed the study of law at the University of Vienna. He juggled a commitment to the University and his new position as a Reinhardt apprentice. The two developed a mentor and protege relationship, becoming both a confidant and teacher. When the theater opened, on April 1, 1924, Preminger appeared as a furniture mover in Reinhardt's comedia staging of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. His next, and more substantial appearance came late in the next month with William Dieterle (who would also later move to Hollywood) in The Merchant of Venice. Other notable alumni who Preminger would work with the same year were Mady Christians, who committed suicide after having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, and Nora Gregor, who was to star in Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939).
Reinhardt may have had reservations about Preminger's acting but he quickly detected the young man's abilities as an administrator. He appointed Preminger as an assistant in the Reinhardt acting school that opened in the theater at Schönbrunn, the former summer palace of the emperor. The following summer, a frustrated Preminger was no longer content to occupy the place of a subordinate and he decided to leave the Reinhardt fold. His status as a Reinhardt muse gave him an edge over much of his competition when it came to joining German-speaking theater. Preminger hopped from theater to theater and decided to call it quits with the acting, and focus on directing, partly because of hair loss.[citation needed]
His first theater assignments as a director in Aussig were plays ranging from the sexually provocative Lulu, and from Berlin he imported Roar China, a pro-Communist agitprop. Preminger displayed an undertaking pleasure in discovering new talent, but found pitfalls with his unruly tempor and disdain for directorial collaborations. In 1930, a wealthy industrialist from Graz, approached the rising young theater director with an offer to directed a film called Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Lover).[citation needed]
Preminger didn't have the same passion for the medium as he had for theater. He accepted the assignment nonetheless. The film premiered at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on 21 December 1931, to strong reviews and business. From 1931-1935, Preminger directed twenty-six shows. Among the performers he hired, a number, including Lili Darvas, Lilia Skala, Harry Horner, Oskar Karlweis, Albert Bassermann, and Luise Rainer who was to win back-to-back Academy Awards in 1936 and 1937.[citation needed]
It wasn't until the spring of 1931 that Preminger's carefree bachelor lifestyle was threatened when he a Hungarian woman named Marion Mill. The couple married soon afterwards in the summer of 1932 in a plain ceremony on the bride's birthday, August 3, only thirty minutes after her divorce from her first husband had been finalized. The couple moved into an apartment of their own. Preminger immediately informed his wife that she could not pursue a theatrical career.[citation needed]
[edit] Hollywood
In April 1935, as Preminger was rehearsing a boulevard farce, The King with an Umbrella, he received a summons from American film producer Joseph Schenck to a five o'clock meeting at the Imperial Hotel. In 1924 Schenck had become the president of United Artists, and in 1934 had founded a new company called Twentieth Century. Two years later (only several months before his meeting with Preminger), Schenck had taken over William Fox's ailing studio and with a partner, Darryl F. Zanuck, had set up a new entity, Twentieth Century-Fox. At the new studio, Zanuck handled all film production while Schneck managed the finances. The duo, now in competition with already well-established studios such as Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, were on the lookout for new talent. Within a half-hour Preminger accepted an invitation to come to work for Fox in Los Angeles.[citation needed]
Sam Spiegel, later himself a film producer, accompanied Preminger from Vienna to Paris by train and from Paris, Otto on his own took another train to Le Havre, where he joined up with Gilbert Miller and his wife, Kitty Miller, who sailed with him to New York, on the Normandie. The Normandie arrived in New York on October 21, 1935. Upon the Premingers' arrival in Hollywood, Schenck introduced the couple to its array of movie royalty including Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.
Preminger's first assignment was to direct a vehicle for Lawrence Tibbett, a renowned opera singer Zanuck wanted to get rid of. Tibbett had achieved mild success for MGM in musicals throughout the early 1930s and then returned to the stage. Zanuck later lured Tibbett back to films with a generous contract. Preminger worked efficiently, completing the film well within the budget and well before the scheduled shooting deadline. The film opened to tepid notices in November 1936. Preminger, proving to Zanuck's satisfaction that he was not a typical rebellious European hotshot, graduated.[citation needed]
Zanuck promoted him to the A-list, assigning him a story called Nancy Steele Is Missing, which was to star Wallace Beery, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Champ. Beery, however, refused to do so, saying, "I won't do a picture with a director whose name I can't pronounce". Zanuck instead gave Preminger the task of directing another B-picture comedy called Danger - Love at Work. French starlet Simone Simon was cast in the lead but was later fired by Zanuck and replaced with Ann Sothern. The premise told the story of a lawyer who must persuade eight members of an eccentric rich family to agree to hand over land left them by their grandfather to a corporation for development. Reviews of the disposable farce, released in September 1937, were surprisingly pleasant.
In November 1937, Zanuck's perennial emissary Gregory Ratoff brought Preminger the news that Zanuck had chosen him to direct Kidnapped, the most expensive feature to date for the studio. Zanuck himself had adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, set in the Scottish Highlands. After reading Zanuck's script, Preminger knew he was in trouble; a foreign director directing in a foreign setting? During the shooting of Kidnapped Preminger had the first of his notorious tantrums. While screening footage of the film to Zanuck, the studio head accused Preminger of making changes in a scene between child actor Freddie Bartholomew and a dog. Preminger, composed at first, explained he had shot the scene exactly as written. Zanuck insisted he knew his own script, and disagreed. The confrontation escalated quickly and ended with Preminger exiting the office and slamming the door. Days later the lock to Preminger's office was changed and his name was removed from the door. After his parking space was relocated to a remote spot, Preminger stopped going to the studio. At that point, an official of Zanuck's offered Preminger a buyout deal which he rejected: Preminger wanted to be paid for the remaining eleven months of his two-year contract. Preminger searched for work at other studios, but received no offers. Only two years after his arrival in Hollywood, Preminger was now unemployed. He focused on the stage with great success. Success came quickly on Broadway for Preminger, with long-running productions including Outward Bound with Laurette Taylor and Vincent Price, My Dear Children with John and Elaine Barrymore and Margin for Error, in which Preminger played a shiny-domed villainous Nazi.
A week after the opening of Margin, Preminger was offered a teaching position at the Yale School of Drama. Preminger began commuting twice a week to Yale to lecture on directing and acting. Nunnally Johnson, a Hollywood writer impressed with Preminger's performance in Margin, called to ask if he would be interested in playing another Nazi in a film called The Pied Piper. In need of money, Preminger accepted on the spot. The film was to be made for Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio which had banished him. Even in the absence of Zanuck, who joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, Preminger did not expect to remain in Hollywood. After collecting a sizable salary for his work, Preminger was preparing to return to New York when his agent informed him that Fox wanted him to reprise his role in the upcoming film adaptation of Margin for Error. Famed director Ernst Lubitsch was set to direct and Preminger was to appear onscreen with Joan Bennett and Milton Berle. Lubitsch withdrew not long after production began and Preminger saw his chance to gain back what he had lost in his falling-out with Zanuck, a chance to direct again. William Goetz, who was running Fox in Zanuck's absence, was persuaded by Preminger and took the bait.[citation needed]
With the present script of Margin in shambles, Preminger hired a movie novice named Samuel Fuller, who at the moment was on leave from the Army, to rework the entire script. Goetz was soon impressed with his views of the dailies each night and offered Preminger a new seven-year contract calling on his services as both a director and actor. Preminger took full measure of the temporary studio czar and accepted. Preminger completed production on schedule with a slightly increased budget in November 1942. Critics were dismissive upon its release the following February, noting the bad timing of the release, coinciding with the war.[citation needed]
Before his next assignment with Fox, Preminger was asked by movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn to appear as a Nazi yet again, this time in a Bob Hope comedy called They Got Me Covered. Preminger hoped to find possible properties he could develop before Zanuck's return, one of which was Vera Caspary's suspense novel Laura. Before production would begin on Laura, Preminger was given the green light to direct and to produce Army Wives. Army Wives was another B-picture morale booster for a country at war, showing the sacrifices made by women as they send their husbands off to the frontlines. Cast in the lead was Jeanne Crain, a contract star for Fox who was being groomed for the A-list. Veteran character actor Eugene Pallette played Crain's father. Preminger clashed with Pallette and claimed he was "an admirer of Hitler and convinced that Germany would win the war". Pallete also refused to sit down at the same table with a black actor in a scene set in a kitchen. "You're out of your mind, I won't sit next to a nigger", Pallette hissed at Preminger.[citation needed] Otto furiously informed Zanuck, who fired the actor, whose scenes had already been shot. Army Wives was given a new title, In the Meantime, Darling, and opened in September 1944, with an estimated budget of $450,000. Aside from the incident with Pallette, no other complications arose during the filming; the hurdles would instead come soon after during the shooting of Laura.
[edit] Laura
Zanuck returned from the armed services with his grudge against Preminger remaining. Although Preminger had been forgiven by Zanuck, he was not granted permission to direct Laura, but only allowed to produce the picture. Instead, Rouben Mamoulian would direct. Mamoulian began ignoring his producer and even started to rewrite the script. Although Preminger had no complaints about the casting of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he balked at their choice for Waldo: Laird Cregar. Preminger explained to Zanuck that audiences would immediately identify with Cregar as a villain, especially after Cregar's role as Jack the Ripper a year earlier in The Lodger. Preminger instead was ideally taken by stage actor Clifton Webb. Even after Zanuck made crude remarks about Webb's homosexuality, Preminger persuaded his boss to at least give Webb a screen test. The persuasion paid off and Webb was cast (and earned a long-term Fox contract), and Mamoulian was fired for creative differences.[citation needed]
Laura started filming on April 27, 1944, with a projected budget of $849,000. After Preminger took over, the film continued shooting well into late June. The film was an instant hit with audiences and critics alike, earning Preminger his first Academy Award nomination for his direction, Clifton Webb a Best Supporting Actor nomination, Lyle Wheeler, an art direction nomination, and Joseph La Shelle won the Academy Award for his cinematography. It propelled its two relatively unknown young actors Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews to the top of the Hollywood box office. David Raksin's haunting theme song would become one of the most memorable in Hollywood history. Laura's theme is one of the most recorded songs, with over four hundred known renditions from Frank Sinatra to Carly Simon.[1]
[edit] Peak years
Preminger expected that acclaim for Laura would promote him to work on better pictures, but his professional fate was in the hands of Darryl Zanuck, who had Preminger take over for the ailing Ernst Lubitsch, who had recently suffered a heart attack, on A Royal Scandal, a remake of Lubitsch's own 1924 silent Forbidden Paradise, starring Pola Negri as Catherine the Great. Before his heart attack, Lubitsch had spent months in preparation, and had already cast the film. Preminger, who had known Tallulah Bankhead before the start of the Nazi invasion into Austria, got along well with Bankhead. The film received lackluster reviews and failed to earn back any gross revenue. Bankhead would only appear in one more film, two decades later.
Preminger's next picture Fallen Angel (1945) was exactly what Preminger had been anticipating. In Fallen Angel, a con man and a womanizer ends up by chance in a small California town, where he romances a sultry waitress and a well-to-do spinster. When the waitress is found killed, the drifter, played by Dana Andrews, becomes the prime suspect. Zanuck gave Preminger the task of convincing Alice Faye, the studio's top musical star of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to play the role of the spinster. Zanuck hoped Faye's appearance would boost the film's box-office appeal and introduce Faye back into the public eye. Linda Darnell was given the role of the doomed waitress.
Centennial Summer, Preminger's next film, would be his first to be shot entirely in color. Hoping to duplicate the success of MGM's 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Zanuck enlisted both Preminger and composer Jerome Kern. The musical detailing two sisters in an idealized all-American working-class family, who become rivals over the same man. The cast included Darnell and Jeanne Crain as dueling sisters, Cornel Wilde as the object of their affection, and veteran stars Walter Brennan, Constance Bennett, and Dorothy Gish in supporting roles. The reviews and box office draw were tepid when the film was released in July 1946, but by the end of that year Preminger had one of the most sumptuous contracts on the lot, earning $7,500 a week.[citation needed]
Kathleen Winsor's internationally popular novel Forever Amber, published in 1944, was Zanuck's next investment into adaptation. Preminger had read the book and disliked it immensely. Preminger had another best seller aimed at a female audience in mind, Daisy Kenyon. Zanuck pledged that if Preminger do Forever Amber first, he could go to town with Daisy Kenyon afterwards. Forever Amber had already begun shooting for nearly six weeks when Preminger replaced director John Stahl. Zanuck had already spent nearly two million dollars on the production. First, Preminger decided the script needed to be completely rewritten, and Peggy Cummins, the film's leading lady would have to be replaced, whom Otto found to be "amateurish beyond belief". Only after returning in his revised script did Preminger learn that Zanuck had already cast Linda Darnell in place of Cummins. The heroine in the novel was blonde, and Preminger was convinced it was necessary to cast a true blonde, Lana Turner, who was under contract to MGM. Zanuck protested, and was convinced that whoever played Amber would become a big star, and wanted that woman to be one of the studio's own. Zanuck had bought the book because of its scandalous reputation promised big box-office returns, and was not surprised when the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film glamorizing a promiscuous heroine who has a child out of wedlock. Forever Amber opened to big business in October 1947, and garnered decent reviews. Preminger later recalled the Forever Amber was "by far the most expensive picture I ever made and it was also the worst".[citation needed]
Throughout the five-month shoot on Forever Amber Preminger maintained a busy schedule, working regularly with writers on scripts for two upcoming projects, Daisy Kenyon and The Dark Wood. Preminger was finally relieved to be working on Daisy Kenyon. Joan Crawford starred in the title role as a magazine illustrator facing a romantic conflict: Will she choose a prominent, married lawyer or an unmarried neurotic veteran? Crawford was enthusiastic about the role, coming only two years after winning an Academy Award for Mildred Pierce.[citation needed] Dana Andrews is the unfaithful lawyer whose unloved wife, played by Ruth Warrick, takes her anger out on her daughters and beats them hysterically. Henry Fonda is a grieving widower and war vet plagued by nightmares. Variety magazine proclaimed, the film is "high powered melodrama surefire for the femme market".[citation needed]
After the modest success of Daisy Kenyon (1947), Preminger, an avid careerist, saw That Lady in Ermine as an opportunity. Betty Grable was cast as a countess who saves her small mythical country when she seduces the Hungarian colonel in charge of the occupation, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The film had previously been another Lubitsch project, but after his sudden death in November 1947, Preminger took over direction. When the film opened to modest business in July 1948, it received better notices than it deserved as reviewers scrambled to discern traces of Lubitsch's hand. Preminger's next film would be another period piece based on a literary classic, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1897 play Lady Windermere's Fan. Over the spring and early summer of 1948 Otto renovated Wilde's play into The Fan. Madeleine Carroll plays Mrs. Erlynne, who tries to save her married daughter Lady Windermere (Jeanne Crain) from ruining her reputation. As Preminger fully expected, The Fan (1949) opened to poor notices.
[edit] Later career
Starting in the 1950s, Preminger's reputation rose to the point that he was commissioned to direct a number of prestigious projects with A-list casts and based on successful novels or stage works. Some of his most significant films of this period include:
* The Moon is Blue (1953): controversially bucked the Legion of Decency's moral standards
* Carmen Jones (1954): A reworking of the opera Carmen in an African-American setting
* The Man with the Golden Arm (1955): Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, one of the first Hollywood films to deal with heroin addiction
* Porgy and Bess (1959): A Hollywoodization of the Gershwin opera
* Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Critically acclaimed, quite explicit courtroom drama about murder-rape. Nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award
* Exodus (1960): Filming of the Leon Uris bestseller set around the founding of the state of Israel
* Advise and Consent (1962): a political drama from the Allen Drury bestseller with a homosexual subtheme
* The Cardinal (1963): A drama set in the Vatican hierarchy which earned Preminger his second Best Director Academy Award nomination
* Bunny Lake is Missing (1965): A naturalistic return to the mystery/thriller genre, set in England.
Several of these films broke new ground for Hollywood in tackling controversial and taboo topics, thereby challenging both the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code of censorship and the Hollywood blacklist. Forever Amber (1947) was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, which successfully lobbied 20th Century Fox to make changes to the film. The League also condemned the 1953 comedy The Moon is Blue, based on a Broadway play which did not inspire mass protests, for its use of the words "virgin" and "pregnant", and the film was notably released without the Production Code Seal of Approval.[citation needed] The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) broke new ground with its exploration of the then taboo subject of heroin addiction, as did Anatomy of a Murder with its frank courtroom discussions of rape and sexual intercourse — the censors objected to the use of words such as "rape", "sperm", "sexual climax" and "penetration". Preminger made but one concession (substituting "violation" for "penetration") and the picture was released with the MPAA seal, marking the beginning of the end of the Production Code. On Exodus (1960) Preminger struck the first major blow against the Hollywood blacklist by openly hiring banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was credited under his own name for the first time in a decade.
From the mid-1950s, most of Preminger's films utilized distinctive animated titles designed by Saul Bass, and many had modern jazz scores. At the New York City Opera, in October 1953, Preminger directed the American premiere (in English translation) of Gottfried von Einem's Der Prozeß (The Trial), after Franz Kafka. Soprano Phyllis Curtin headed the cast.
Preminger also acted in a few movies; his most memorable role is that of the warden of a German POW camp in Stalag 17. In the 1960s Batman television series, Preminger was the second of three actors who played Mr. Freeze, in the two-parter "Green Ice/Deep Freeze." Adam West, who portrayed Batman, remembers Preminger as rude and unpleasant. This feeling was echoed by Laurence Olivier, who played a police inspector in Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). In his autobiography Confessions of an Actor Olivier and co-star Noel Coward recall Preminger as "a bully".[citation needed] Ingo Preminger, who produced the 1970 M*A*S*H movie, was Otto Preminger's younger brother.
Starting from 1965 on, Preminger made a string of films where he tried to keep his stories fresh and distinctive, but the films he made, including In Harm's Way (1965) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), became both critical and financial bombs. In 1967, Preminger released Hurry Sundown, a lengthy drama set in the U.S. South and partially intended to break cinematic racial and sexual taboos. However, the film was poorly received and ridiculed for a heavy-handed approach, and for the casting of Michael Caine as a Southern patriarch. Hurry Sundown signaled a rather precipitous decline in Preminger's reputation, as it was followed by several other films which were critical and commercial failures,[citation needed]including Skidoo (1968), a failed attempt at a hip sixties comedy (and Groucho Marx's last film), and Rosebud (1975), a terrorism thriller which was also widely ridiculed. Several publicized disputes with leading actors did further damage to Preminger's reputation. His last film, an adaptation of the Graham Greene espionage novel The Human Factor (1979), had financial problems and was barely released.
[edit] Personal life
As they continued living together, Preminger and his wife Marion, became more and more estranged. It was an open secret that the two had an arrangement, whereby as long as he promised not to seek a divorce, Preminger was free to see other women. In effect, he lived like a bachelor, as was the case when he met burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee and began an open relationship with her. Lee had already attempted a crack in movies, but was never to be taken seriously as anything more than a stripper, and appeared in B-pictures in less-than-minor roles. Preminger's liaison with Lee produced a child, Erik.[citation needed] Lee rejected the idea of Preminger helping to support the child, and instead elicited a vow of silence from Preminger: he was not to reveal Erik's paternity to anyone, including Erik himself. Lee called the boy Erik Kirkland, after her separated husband, Alexander Kirkland. It was not until 1966, when Preminger was sixty and Erik twenty-two, that they were to meet finally as father and son.[citation needed]
Although Preminger and his wife Marion had been estranged for years, he was surprised when in May 1946 Marion asked for a divorce. On a trip to Mexico she had met a very wealthy, and married, Swedish financier named Axel Wennergren. The divorce ended smoothly and speedily. Marion did not seek any alimony, just a few personal belongings that would be picked up in a few days by her fiancé's private plane. Mrs. Wennergren, madly jealous of her rival, began to stalk Marion and was not willing to grant a divorce. Marion even went as far as to claim that Mrs. Wennergreen attempted to shoot her at a post office in Mexico. Marion returned to Preminger's home feeling embarrassed and shamed. She again resumed her appearances as Preminger's wife, and nothing more. Preminger was enjoying his escapades as a freewheeling man-about-town and had begun dating Natalie Draper, a niece of Marion Davies.[citation needed]
While filming Carmen Jones (1954), Preminger began an affair with star Dorothy Dandridge, which lasted four years. During that period, Preminger advised her on career matters, including an offer made to Dandridge for the featured role of Tuptim in the 1956 film of The King and I. Preminger advised her to turn down the supporting role, as he believed it to be unworthy of her; this proved to be poor advice, which Dandridge later regretted.[2] She ended the affair with Preminger upon realization that he had no plans to leave his first wife to marry her.[citation needed]Their affair was depicted in the HBO Pictures biopic, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.
[edit] Death
The niche of Otto Preminger in Woodlawn Cemetery
Otto Preminger died in New York City in 1986, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. He was cremated and is interred in a niche in the Azalea Room of the Velma B. Woolworth Memorial Chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York.
[edit] Filmography
* Die große Liebe (1931)
* Under Your Spell (1936)
* Danger - Love at Work (1937)
* Kidnapped (1938)
* Clare Boothe Luce's Margin for Error (U.S.) also known as Margin for Error (UK) (1943)
* In the Meantime, Darling (1944)
* Laura (1944)
* A Royal Scandal (U.S.) also known as Czarina (UK) (1945)
* Fallen Angel (1945)
* Centennial Summer (1946)
* Forever Amber (1947)
* Daisy Kenyon (1947)
* The Fan (U.S.) also known as Lady Windermere's Fan (UK) (1949)
* Whirlpool (1949)
* Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
* The 13th Letter (1951)
* Angel Face (1952)
* Stalag 17 (1953) (acting only, directed by Billy Wilder)
* The Moon Is Blue (1953)
* Carmen Jones (1954)
* River of No Return (1954)
* The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (U.S.) also known as One Man Mutiny (UK) (1955)
* The Man with the Golden Arm (1956)
* Saint Joan (1957)
* Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
* Porgy and Bess (1959)
* Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
* Exodus (1960)
* Advise and Consent (1962)
* The Cardinal (1963)
* In Harm's Way (1965)
* Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
* Hurry Sundown (1967)
* Skidoo (1968)
* Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970)
* Such Good Friends (1971)
* Rosebud (1975)
* The Hobbit (1977) (actor only)
* The Human Factor (1979)
[edit] Awards
Preminger received one Oscar nomination for Best Picture for Anatomy of a Murder. He was twice nominated for the best director award for Laura and for The Cardinal.
He won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 5th Berlin International Film Festival and the Bronze Berlin Bear award for the film Carmen Jones.[3]
[edit] References
1. ^ Allmusic.com
2. ^ "Dorothy Dandridge Profile". tcm.com. http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=114172.
3. ^ "5th Berlin International Film Festival: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1955/03_preistraeger_1955/03_Preistraeger_1955.html. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
[edit] Notes
* Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (2007)
* Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (2008)
* David Denby, Balance of Terror—How Otto Preminger Made His Movies, The New Yorker, January 14, 2008.
* Nathaniel Rich, The Deceptive Director, The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Theater
o 2.2 Hollywood
+ 2.2.1 Laura
o 2.3 Peak years
o 2.4 Later career
* 3 Personal life
* 4 Death
* 5 Filmography
o 5.1 Awards
* 6 References
* 7 Notes
* 8 External links
[edit] Early life
Preminger was born in 1905 in Wiznitz, a town west of Czernowitz, Northern Bukovyna, in today's Ukraine, then part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, to Markus and Josefa Preminger. Preminger's father was born in 1877 in Galicia, at a time when it was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. As an Attorney General of Austria–Hungary, Markus was a proud public prosecutor on the cusp of an extraordinary career defending the interests of the Emperor Franz Josef. The couple provided a stable home life for Preminger and his brother Ingo.
"My father believed that it was impossible to be too kind or loving to a child. He never punished me. I don't think my mother agreed completely with this method but she acted, as always, according to his wishes. I adored him. I had an affectionate relationship with my mother; she was a wonderful, warm-hearted woman, but she did not really play a large part in the formation of my character. Intellectually my father influenced me more than my mother."
[citation needed]
After the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, which led to the Great War, Russia entered the war on the Serbian side, and tsarist armies began to invade Eastern Europe. Perilously close to Russia, Czernowitz was especially vulnerable. Like other refugees in flight, Markus Preminger saw Austria as a safe haven for his family. He was able to secure a job as a public prosecutor in Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria. Preminger prosecuted nationalist Serbs and Croats who had been imprisoned as suspected enemies of the Empire. When the Preminger family relocated, Otto was nearly nine, and was enrolled in a school where instruction in Catholic dogma was mandatory and Jewish history and religion had no place on the syllabus. Ingo, not yet four, remained at home. Otto was often teased by Catholic classmates and was told by his father to answer that he was Jewish when asked.[citation needed]
After a year in Graz, the decisive public prosecutor was summoned to Vienna, where he was offered an eminent position, roughly equivalent to that of the United States Attorney General. Markus was told that the position would be his only if he converted to Catholicism. In a gesture of defiance and self-assertion, Markus refused. He received the position anyway. In 1915, Markus relocated his family to Vienna, the city that Otto later claimed to have been born in. Although now working for the emperor, Markus was a government official, respectable, but not part of the highly-prized inner city. As a result, the family started their new lives with rather modest quarters. Vienna was still an imperial capital with an array of cultural offerings that tempted Otto, at ten already incurably stagestruck. Often accompanied by his maternal grandfather, Otto made regular visits, sometimes as many as three or four a week, to the Burgtheater on the Ringstrasse, where he saw a wide variety of both classical and contemporary plays.[citation needed]
[edit] Career
[edit] Theater
Preminger's first theatrical ambition was to become an actor. In his early teens, Otto was able to recite from memory many of the great monologues from the international classic repertory, and, never shy, he demanded an audience. Preminger's most successful performance in the National Library rotunda was Mark Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar. As he read, watched, and after a fashion, began to produce plays, he started to miss more and more classes of school. Austria's failing fortunes during the war had no impact on the Premingers. Markus moved his family to a more fashionable district in 1916. Throughout the war years, Otto, now often with his younger brother, continued to go to the theater and concerts, museums, and the National Library, while his attendance in school remained irregular.[citation needed]
As the war came to an end, Markus formed his own law practice. Markus instilled in both his sons a sense of fair play as well as respect for those with opposing view-points, and rather than becoming reactionary conservatives, as their privileged upbringing might seem to be foreordained, Otto and Ingo became lifelong liberal Democrats. As his father's practice continued to thrive in post-war Vienna, Otto began seriously contemplating a career in the theater. At the age of 16, he won the role of Lysander in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.[citation needed]
In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Preminger's soon-to-be mentor, Max Reinhardt, a Viennese-born director who had established his base of operation in Berlin, announced plans to establish a theatrical company in Vienna in a rundown 135-year old theater. Reinhardt's announcement was seen as a call of destiny to Preminger. He began writing to Reinhardt weekly, requesting an audition. After a few months, Preminger, frustrated, gave up, and stopped his daily visit to the post office to check for a response. Unbeknowst to him, a letter was waiting with a date for an audition Preminger had already missed by two days. Feigning illness, Preminger skipped classes and began to hover near the stage door hoping to encounter Reinhardt associate Dr. Stefan Hock, begging for another audition. The day finally came when Hock took Preminger directly inside to Reinhardt and his associates. Preminger was immediately accepted.[citation needed]
Preminger explained to his father that a career in theater was not just a ploy to excuse himself from school. This was a way of life, and it was the only one he wanted. In order to obtain his father's full blessing, Preminger finished school and completed the study of law at the University of Vienna. He juggled a commitment to the University and his new position as a Reinhardt apprentice. The two developed a mentor and protege relationship, becoming both a confidant and teacher. When the theater opened, on April 1, 1924, Preminger appeared as a furniture mover in Reinhardt's comedia staging of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. His next, and more substantial appearance came late in the next month with William Dieterle (who would also later move to Hollywood) in The Merchant of Venice. Other notable alumni who Preminger would work with the same year were Mady Christians, who committed suicide after having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era in Hollywood, and Nora Gregor, who was to star in Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939).
Reinhardt may have had reservations about Preminger's acting but he quickly detected the young man's abilities as an administrator. He appointed Preminger as an assistant in the Reinhardt acting school that opened in the theater at Schönbrunn, the former summer palace of the emperor. The following summer, a frustrated Preminger was no longer content to occupy the place of a subordinate and he decided to leave the Reinhardt fold. His status as a Reinhardt muse gave him an edge over much of his competition when it came to joining German-speaking theater. Preminger hopped from theater to theater and decided to call it quits with the acting, and focus on directing, partly because of hair loss.[citation needed]
His first theater assignments as a director in Aussig were plays ranging from the sexually provocative Lulu, and from Berlin he imported Roar China, a pro-Communist agitprop. Preminger displayed an undertaking pleasure in discovering new talent, but found pitfalls with his unruly tempor and disdain for directorial collaborations. In 1930, a wealthy industrialist from Graz, approached the rising young theater director with an offer to directed a film called Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Lover).[citation needed]
Preminger didn't have the same passion for the medium as he had for theater. He accepted the assignment nonetheless. The film premiered at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on 21 December 1931, to strong reviews and business. From 1931-1935, Preminger directed twenty-six shows. Among the performers he hired, a number, including Lili Darvas, Lilia Skala, Harry Horner, Oskar Karlweis, Albert Bassermann, and Luise Rainer who was to win back-to-back Academy Awards in 1936 and 1937.[citation needed]
It wasn't until the spring of 1931 that Preminger's carefree bachelor lifestyle was threatened when he a Hungarian woman named Marion Mill. The couple married soon afterwards in the summer of 1932 in a plain ceremony on the bride's birthday, August 3, only thirty minutes after her divorce from her first husband had been finalized. The couple moved into an apartment of their own. Preminger immediately informed his wife that she could not pursue a theatrical career.[citation needed]
[edit] Hollywood
In April 1935, as Preminger was rehearsing a boulevard farce, The King with an Umbrella, he received a summons from American film producer Joseph Schenck to a five o'clock meeting at the Imperial Hotel. In 1924 Schenck had become the president of United Artists, and in 1934 had founded a new company called Twentieth Century. Two years later (only several months before his meeting with Preminger), Schenck had taken over William Fox's ailing studio and with a partner, Darryl F. Zanuck, had set up a new entity, Twentieth Century-Fox. At the new studio, Zanuck handled all film production while Schneck managed the finances. The duo, now in competition with already well-established studios such as Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, were on the lookout for new talent. Within a half-hour Preminger accepted an invitation to come to work for Fox in Los Angeles.[citation needed]
Sam Spiegel, later himself a film producer, accompanied Preminger from Vienna to Paris by train and from Paris, Otto on his own took another train to Le Havre, where he joined up with Gilbert Miller and his wife, Kitty Miller, who sailed with him to New York, on the Normandie. The Normandie arrived in New York on October 21, 1935. Upon the Premingers' arrival in Hollywood, Schenck introduced the couple to its array of movie royalty including Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo.
Preminger's first assignment was to direct a vehicle for Lawrence Tibbett, a renowned opera singer Zanuck wanted to get rid of. Tibbett had achieved mild success for MGM in musicals throughout the early 1930s and then returned to the stage. Zanuck later lured Tibbett back to films with a generous contract. Preminger worked efficiently, completing the film well within the budget and well before the scheduled shooting deadline. The film opened to tepid notices in November 1936. Preminger, proving to Zanuck's satisfaction that he was not a typical rebellious European hotshot, graduated.[citation needed]
Zanuck promoted him to the A-list, assigning him a story called Nancy Steele Is Missing, which was to star Wallace Beery, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Champ. Beery, however, refused to do so, saying, "I won't do a picture with a director whose name I can't pronounce". Zanuck instead gave Preminger the task of directing another B-picture comedy called Danger - Love at Work. French starlet Simone Simon was cast in the lead but was later fired by Zanuck and replaced with Ann Sothern. The premise told the story of a lawyer who must persuade eight members of an eccentric rich family to agree to hand over land left them by their grandfather to a corporation for development. Reviews of the disposable farce, released in September 1937, were surprisingly pleasant.
In November 1937, Zanuck's perennial emissary Gregory Ratoff brought Preminger the news that Zanuck had chosen him to direct Kidnapped, the most expensive feature to date for the studio. Zanuck himself had adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, set in the Scottish Highlands. After reading Zanuck's script, Preminger knew he was in trouble; a foreign director directing in a foreign setting? During the shooting of Kidnapped Preminger had the first of his notorious tantrums. While screening footage of the film to Zanuck, the studio head accused Preminger of making changes in a scene between child actor Freddie Bartholomew and a dog. Preminger, composed at first, explained he had shot the scene exactly as written. Zanuck insisted he knew his own script, and disagreed. The confrontation escalated quickly and ended with Preminger exiting the office and slamming the door. Days later the lock to Preminger's office was changed and his name was removed from the door. After his parking space was relocated to a remote spot, Preminger stopped going to the studio. At that point, an official of Zanuck's offered Preminger a buyout deal which he rejected: Preminger wanted to be paid for the remaining eleven months of his two-year contract. Preminger searched for work at other studios, but received no offers. Only two years after his arrival in Hollywood, Preminger was now unemployed. He focused on the stage with great success. Success came quickly on Broadway for Preminger, with long-running productions including Outward Bound with Laurette Taylor and Vincent Price, My Dear Children with John and Elaine Barrymore and Margin for Error, in which Preminger played a shiny-domed villainous Nazi.
A week after the opening of Margin, Preminger was offered a teaching position at the Yale School of Drama. Preminger began commuting twice a week to Yale to lecture on directing and acting. Nunnally Johnson, a Hollywood writer impressed with Preminger's performance in Margin, called to ask if he would be interested in playing another Nazi in a film called The Pied Piper. In need of money, Preminger accepted on the spot. The film was to be made for Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio which had banished him. Even in the absence of Zanuck, who joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, Preminger did not expect to remain in Hollywood. After collecting a sizable salary for his work, Preminger was preparing to return to New York when his agent informed him that Fox wanted him to reprise his role in the upcoming film adaptation of Margin for Error. Famed director Ernst Lubitsch was set to direct and Preminger was to appear onscreen with Joan Bennett and Milton Berle. Lubitsch withdrew not long after production began and Preminger saw his chance to gain back what he had lost in his falling-out with Zanuck, a chance to direct again. William Goetz, who was running Fox in Zanuck's absence, was persuaded by Preminger and took the bait.[citation needed]
With the present script of Margin in shambles, Preminger hired a movie novice named Samuel Fuller, who at the moment was on leave from the Army, to rework the entire script. Goetz was soon impressed with his views of the dailies each night and offered Preminger a new seven-year contract calling on his services as both a director and actor. Preminger took full measure of the temporary studio czar and accepted. Preminger completed production on schedule with a slightly increased budget in November 1942. Critics were dismissive upon its release the following February, noting the bad timing of the release, coinciding with the war.[citation needed]
Before his next assignment with Fox, Preminger was asked by movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn to appear as a Nazi yet again, this time in a Bob Hope comedy called They Got Me Covered. Preminger hoped to find possible properties he could develop before Zanuck's return, one of which was Vera Caspary's suspense novel Laura. Before production would begin on Laura, Preminger was given the green light to direct and to produce Army Wives. Army Wives was another B-picture morale booster for a country at war, showing the sacrifices made by women as they send their husbands off to the frontlines. Cast in the lead was Jeanne Crain, a contract star for Fox who was being groomed for the A-list. Veteran character actor Eugene Pallette played Crain's father. Preminger clashed with Pallette and claimed he was "an admirer of Hitler and convinced that Germany would win the war". Pallete also refused to sit down at the same table with a black actor in a scene set in a kitchen. "You're out of your mind, I won't sit next to a nigger", Pallette hissed at Preminger.[citation needed] Otto furiously informed Zanuck, who fired the actor, whose scenes had already been shot. Army Wives was given a new title, In the Meantime, Darling, and opened in September 1944, with an estimated budget of $450,000. Aside from the incident with Pallette, no other complications arose during the filming; the hurdles would instead come soon after during the shooting of Laura.
[edit] Laura
Zanuck returned from the armed services with his grudge against Preminger remaining. Although Preminger had been forgiven by Zanuck, he was not granted permission to direct Laura, but only allowed to produce the picture. Instead, Rouben Mamoulian would direct. Mamoulian began ignoring his producer and even started to rewrite the script. Although Preminger had no complaints about the casting of Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he balked at their choice for Waldo: Laird Cregar. Preminger explained to Zanuck that audiences would immediately identify with Cregar as a villain, especially after Cregar's role as Jack the Ripper a year earlier in The Lodger. Preminger instead was ideally taken by stage actor Clifton Webb. Even after Zanuck made crude remarks about Webb's homosexuality, Preminger persuaded his boss to at least give Webb a screen test. The persuasion paid off and Webb was cast (and earned a long-term Fox contract), and Mamoulian was fired for creative differences.[citation needed]
Laura started filming on April 27, 1944, with a projected budget of $849,000. After Preminger took over, the film continued shooting well into late June. The film was an instant hit with audiences and critics alike, earning Preminger his first Academy Award nomination for his direction, Clifton Webb a Best Supporting Actor nomination, Lyle Wheeler, an art direction nomination, and Joseph La Shelle won the Academy Award for his cinematography. It propelled its two relatively unknown young actors Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews to the top of the Hollywood box office. David Raksin's haunting theme song would become one of the most memorable in Hollywood history. Laura's theme is one of the most recorded songs, with over four hundred known renditions from Frank Sinatra to Carly Simon.[1]
[edit] Peak years
Preminger expected that acclaim for Laura would promote him to work on better pictures, but his professional fate was in the hands of Darryl Zanuck, who had Preminger take over for the ailing Ernst Lubitsch, who had recently suffered a heart attack, on A Royal Scandal, a remake of Lubitsch's own 1924 silent Forbidden Paradise, starring Pola Negri as Catherine the Great. Before his heart attack, Lubitsch had spent months in preparation, and had already cast the film. Preminger, who had known Tallulah Bankhead before the start of the Nazi invasion into Austria, got along well with Bankhead. The film received lackluster reviews and failed to earn back any gross revenue. Bankhead would only appear in one more film, two decades later.
Preminger's next picture Fallen Angel (1945) was exactly what Preminger had been anticipating. In Fallen Angel, a con man and a womanizer ends up by chance in a small California town, where he romances a sultry waitress and a well-to-do spinster. When the waitress is found killed, the drifter, played by Dana Andrews, becomes the prime suspect. Zanuck gave Preminger the task of convincing Alice Faye, the studio's top musical star of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to play the role of the spinster. Zanuck hoped Faye's appearance would boost the film's box-office appeal and introduce Faye back into the public eye. Linda Darnell was given the role of the doomed waitress.
Centennial Summer, Preminger's next film, would be his first to be shot entirely in color. Hoping to duplicate the success of MGM's 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Zanuck enlisted both Preminger and composer Jerome Kern. The musical detailing two sisters in an idealized all-American working-class family, who become rivals over the same man. The cast included Darnell and Jeanne Crain as dueling sisters, Cornel Wilde as the object of their affection, and veteran stars Walter Brennan, Constance Bennett, and Dorothy Gish in supporting roles. The reviews and box office draw were tepid when the film was released in July 1946, but by the end of that year Preminger had one of the most sumptuous contracts on the lot, earning $7,500 a week.[citation needed]
Kathleen Winsor's internationally popular novel Forever Amber, published in 1944, was Zanuck's next investment into adaptation. Preminger had read the book and disliked it immensely. Preminger had another best seller aimed at a female audience in mind, Daisy Kenyon. Zanuck pledged that if Preminger do Forever Amber first, he could go to town with Daisy Kenyon afterwards. Forever Amber had already begun shooting for nearly six weeks when Preminger replaced director John Stahl. Zanuck had already spent nearly two million dollars on the production. First, Preminger decided the script needed to be completely rewritten, and Peggy Cummins, the film's leading lady would have to be replaced, whom Otto found to be "amateurish beyond belief". Only after returning in his revised script did Preminger learn that Zanuck had already cast Linda Darnell in place of Cummins. The heroine in the novel was blonde, and Preminger was convinced it was necessary to cast a true blonde, Lana Turner, who was under contract to MGM. Zanuck protested, and was convinced that whoever played Amber would become a big star, and wanted that woman to be one of the studio's own. Zanuck had bought the book because of its scandalous reputation promised big box-office returns, and was not surprised when the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film glamorizing a promiscuous heroine who has a child out of wedlock. Forever Amber opened to big business in October 1947, and garnered decent reviews. Preminger later recalled the Forever Amber was "by far the most expensive picture I ever made and it was also the worst".[citation needed]
Throughout the five-month shoot on Forever Amber Preminger maintained a busy schedule, working regularly with writers on scripts for two upcoming projects, Daisy Kenyon and The Dark Wood. Preminger was finally relieved to be working on Daisy Kenyon. Joan Crawford starred in the title role as a magazine illustrator facing a romantic conflict: Will she choose a prominent, married lawyer or an unmarried neurotic veteran? Crawford was enthusiastic about the role, coming only two years after winning an Academy Award for Mildred Pierce.[citation needed] Dana Andrews is the unfaithful lawyer whose unloved wife, played by Ruth Warrick, takes her anger out on her daughters and beats them hysterically. Henry Fonda is a grieving widower and war vet plagued by nightmares. Variety magazine proclaimed, the film is "high powered melodrama surefire for the femme market".[citation needed]
After the modest success of Daisy Kenyon (1947), Preminger, an avid careerist, saw That Lady in Ermine as an opportunity. Betty Grable was cast as a countess who saves her small mythical country when she seduces the Hungarian colonel in charge of the occupation, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The film had previously been another Lubitsch project, but after his sudden death in November 1947, Preminger took over direction. When the film opened to modest business in July 1948, it received better notices than it deserved as reviewers scrambled to discern traces of Lubitsch's hand. Preminger's next film would be another period piece based on a literary classic, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1897 play Lady Windermere's Fan. Over the spring and early summer of 1948 Otto renovated Wilde's play into The Fan. Madeleine Carroll plays Mrs. Erlynne, who tries to save her married daughter Lady Windermere (Jeanne Crain) from ruining her reputation. As Preminger fully expected, The Fan (1949) opened to poor notices.
[edit] Later career
Starting in the 1950s, Preminger's reputation rose to the point that he was commissioned to direct a number of prestigious projects with A-list casts and based on successful novels or stage works. Some of his most significant films of this period include:
* The Moon is Blue (1953): controversially bucked the Legion of Decency's moral standards
* Carmen Jones (1954): A reworking of the opera Carmen in an African-American setting
* The Man with the Golden Arm (1955): Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, one of the first Hollywood films to deal with heroin addiction
* Porgy and Bess (1959): A Hollywoodization of the Gershwin opera
* Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Critically acclaimed, quite explicit courtroom drama about murder-rape. Nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award
* Exodus (1960): Filming of the Leon Uris bestseller set around the founding of the state of Israel
* Advise and Consent (1962): a political drama from the Allen Drury bestseller with a homosexual subtheme
* The Cardinal (1963): A drama set in the Vatican hierarchy which earned Preminger his second Best Director Academy Award nomination
* Bunny Lake is Missing (1965): A naturalistic return to the mystery/thriller genre, set in England.
Several of these films broke new ground for Hollywood in tackling controversial and taboo topics, thereby challenging both the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code of censorship and the Hollywood blacklist. Forever Amber (1947) was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, which successfully lobbied 20th Century Fox to make changes to the film. The League also condemned the 1953 comedy The Moon is Blue, based on a Broadway play which did not inspire mass protests, for its use of the words "virgin" and "pregnant", and the film was notably released without the Production Code Seal of Approval.[citation needed] The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) broke new ground with its exploration of the then taboo subject of heroin addiction, as did Anatomy of a Murder with its frank courtroom discussions of rape and sexual intercourse — the censors objected to the use of words such as "rape", "sperm", "sexual climax" and "penetration". Preminger made but one concession (substituting "violation" for "penetration") and the picture was released with the MPAA seal, marking the beginning of the end of the Production Code. On Exodus (1960) Preminger struck the first major blow against the Hollywood blacklist by openly hiring banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was credited under his own name for the first time in a decade.
From the mid-1950s, most of Preminger's films utilized distinctive animated titles designed by Saul Bass, and many had modern jazz scores. At the New York City Opera, in October 1953, Preminger directed the American premiere (in English translation) of Gottfried von Einem's Der Prozeß (The Trial), after Franz Kafka. Soprano Phyllis Curtin headed the cast.
Preminger also acted in a few movies; his most memorable role is that of the warden of a German POW camp in Stalag 17. In the 1960s Batman television series, Preminger was the second of three actors who played Mr. Freeze, in the two-parter "Green Ice/Deep Freeze." Adam West, who portrayed Batman, remembers Preminger as rude and unpleasant. This feeling was echoed by Laurence Olivier, who played a police inspector in Bunny Lake is Missing (1965). In his autobiography Confessions of an Actor Olivier and co-star Noel Coward recall Preminger as "a bully".[citation needed] Ingo Preminger, who produced the 1970 M*A*S*H movie, was Otto Preminger's younger brother.
Starting from 1965 on, Preminger made a string of films where he tried to keep his stories fresh and distinctive, but the films he made, including In Harm's Way (1965) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), became both critical and financial bombs. In 1967, Preminger released Hurry Sundown, a lengthy drama set in the U.S. South and partially intended to break cinematic racial and sexual taboos. However, the film was poorly received and ridiculed for a heavy-handed approach, and for the casting of Michael Caine as a Southern patriarch. Hurry Sundown signaled a rather precipitous decline in Preminger's reputation, as it was followed by several other films which were critical and commercial failures,[citation needed]including Skidoo (1968), a failed attempt at a hip sixties comedy (and Groucho Marx's last film), and Rosebud (1975), a terrorism thriller which was also widely ridiculed. Several publicized disputes with leading actors did further damage to Preminger's reputation. His last film, an adaptation of the Graham Greene espionage novel The Human Factor (1979), had financial problems and was barely released.
[edit] Personal life
As they continued living together, Preminger and his wife Marion, became more and more estranged. It was an open secret that the two had an arrangement, whereby as long as he promised not to seek a divorce, Preminger was free to see other women. In effect, he lived like a bachelor, as was the case when he met burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee and began an open relationship with her. Lee had already attempted a crack in movies, but was never to be taken seriously as anything more than a stripper, and appeared in B-pictures in less-than-minor roles. Preminger's liaison with Lee produced a child, Erik.[citation needed] Lee rejected the idea of Preminger helping to support the child, and instead elicited a vow of silence from Preminger: he was not to reveal Erik's paternity to anyone, including Erik himself. Lee called the boy Erik Kirkland, after her separated husband, Alexander Kirkland. It was not until 1966, when Preminger was sixty and Erik twenty-two, that they were to meet finally as father and son.[citation needed]
Although Preminger and his wife Marion had been estranged for years, he was surprised when in May 1946 Marion asked for a divorce. On a trip to Mexico she had met a very wealthy, and married, Swedish financier named Axel Wennergren. The divorce ended smoothly and speedily. Marion did not seek any alimony, just a few personal belongings that would be picked up in a few days by her fiancé's private plane. Mrs. Wennergren, madly jealous of her rival, began to stalk Marion and was not willing to grant a divorce. Marion even went as far as to claim that Mrs. Wennergreen attempted to shoot her at a post office in Mexico. Marion returned to Preminger's home feeling embarrassed and shamed. She again resumed her appearances as Preminger's wife, and nothing more. Preminger was enjoying his escapades as a freewheeling man-about-town and had begun dating Natalie Draper, a niece of Marion Davies.[citation needed]
While filming Carmen Jones (1954), Preminger began an affair with star Dorothy Dandridge, which lasted four years. During that period, Preminger advised her on career matters, including an offer made to Dandridge for the featured role of Tuptim in the 1956 film of The King and I. Preminger advised her to turn down the supporting role, as he believed it to be unworthy of her; this proved to be poor advice, which Dandridge later regretted.[2] She ended the affair with Preminger upon realization that he had no plans to leave his first wife to marry her.[citation needed]Their affair was depicted in the HBO Pictures biopic, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.
[edit] Death
The niche of Otto Preminger in Woodlawn Cemetery
Otto Preminger died in New York City in 1986, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. He was cremated and is interred in a niche in the Azalea Room of the Velma B. Woolworth Memorial Chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery, The Bronx, New York.
[edit] Filmography
* Die große Liebe (1931)
* Under Your Spell (1936)
* Danger - Love at Work (1937)
* Kidnapped (1938)
* Clare Boothe Luce's Margin for Error (U.S.) also known as Margin for Error (UK) (1943)
* In the Meantime, Darling (1944)
* Laura (1944)
* A Royal Scandal (U.S.) also known as Czarina (UK) (1945)
* Fallen Angel (1945)
* Centennial Summer (1946)
* Forever Amber (1947)
* Daisy Kenyon (1947)
* The Fan (U.S.) also known as Lady Windermere's Fan (UK) (1949)
* Whirlpool (1949)
* Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
* The 13th Letter (1951)
* Angel Face (1952)
* Stalag 17 (1953) (acting only, directed by Billy Wilder)
* The Moon Is Blue (1953)
* Carmen Jones (1954)
* River of No Return (1954)
* The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (U.S.) also known as One Man Mutiny (UK) (1955)
* The Man with the Golden Arm (1956)
* Saint Joan (1957)
* Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
* Porgy and Bess (1959)
* Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
* Exodus (1960)
* Advise and Consent (1962)
* The Cardinal (1963)
* In Harm's Way (1965)
* Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
* Hurry Sundown (1967)
* Skidoo (1968)
* Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970)
* Such Good Friends (1971)
* Rosebud (1975)
* The Hobbit (1977) (actor only)
* The Human Factor (1979)
[edit] Awards
Preminger received one Oscar nomination for Best Picture for Anatomy of a Murder. He was twice nominated for the best director award for Laura and for The Cardinal.
He won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 5th Berlin International Film Festival and the Bronze Berlin Bear award for the film Carmen Jones.[3]
[edit] References
1. ^ Allmusic.com
2. ^ "Dorothy Dandridge Profile". tcm.com. http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=114172.
3. ^ "5th Berlin International Film Festival: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1955/03_preistraeger_1955/03_Preistraeger_1955.html. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
[edit] Notes
* Foster Hirsch, Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (2007)
* Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (2008)
* David Denby, Balance of Terror—How Otto Preminger Made His Movies, The New Yorker, January 14, 2008.
* Nathaniel Rich, The Deceptive Director, The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008.
Joseph Mankiewicz
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (11 February 1909 – 5 February 1993) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Film career
* 3 Filmography
o 3.1 Director
o 3.2 Writer
* 4 Awards
* 5 Further reading
* 6 References
* 7 External links
[edit] Early life
Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish immigrants from Germany.[1][2][3] He had a sister, Erna Mankiewicz (1901–1979), and a brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who became a screenwriter.[4][5][6]
At age four, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City where he graduated in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School.[7] In 1928, he obtained a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. For a time he worked in Berlin, Germany, as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune newspaper before being lured into the motion picture business.
[edit] Film career
Comfortable in a variety of genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Joseph L. Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylised mise en scène. Mankiewicz worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount and as a producer for MGM before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century-Fox. Over six years he made 11 films for Fox, reaching a peak in 1949 and 1950 when he won consecutive Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve.
During his long career in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote forty-eight screenplays, including All About Eve, for which he won an Academy Award. He also produced more than twenty films including The Philadelphia Story which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. However, he is best known for the films he directed, twice winning the Academy Award for Directing. In 1944, he produced The Keys of the Kingdom, which starred Gregory Peck, and featured Mankiewicz's then-wife, Rose Stradner, in a supporting role as a nun.
In 1951, Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialised, he continued to make films (both for his own production company Figaro and as a director-for-hire) that explored his favourite themes — the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance and the clash between people's urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.[citation needed]
In 1953, for MGM, he directed Julius Caesar, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, author of the book The Great Movie Stars: The Hollywood Years, called it "perhaps the finest Shakespeare film ever made". The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony, and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
In 1958, Mankiewicz directed The Quiet American an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel about the seed of American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, under career pressure from the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, distorted the message of Greene's book, changing major parts of the story to appeal to a national audience. A cautionary tale about America's blind support for "anti-Communists" was turned into, according to Greene, a "propaganda film for America".[citation needed]
Cleopatra consumed three years of Mankiewicz's life and ended up both derailing his career and causing severe financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. Mankiewicz made more films, however, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, his final production.[citation needed]
He was the younger brother of Herman J. Mankiewicz. His sons are writer/director Tom Mankiewicz and producer Christopher Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alexandra Mankiewicz. His great-nephew is radio & television personality Ben Mankiewicz, currently on TCM.
Mankiewicz, who died in 1993, six days before his 84th birthday, was interred in Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard cemetery, Bedford, New York.[7]
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Director
Year Title Production company Cast Notes
1946 Dragonwyck 20th Century Fox Gene Tierney / Vincent Price
Backfire Richard Conte / John Ireland
Somewhere in the Night Richard Conte / John Hodiak / Nancy Guild
1947 The Late George Apley Ronald Colman
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Gene Tierney / Rex Harrison / George Sanders
1948 Escape Rex Harrison / Peggy Cummins / William Hartnell
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Jeanne Crain / Linda Darnell / Ann Southern
House of Strangers Edward G. Robinson / Susan Hayward / Richard Conte
1950 No Way Out Richard Widmark / Sidney Poitier / Linda Darnell
All About Eve Bette Davis / Anne Baxter / George Sanders
1951 People Will Talk Cary Grant / Jeanne Crain / Hume Cronyn
1952 5 Fingers James Mason / Danielle Darrieux
1953 Julius Caesar Marlon Brando / James Mason / John Gielgud
1954 The Barefoot Contessa Humphrey Bogart / Ava Gardner Technicolor film
1955 Guys and Dolls Marlon Brando / Jean Simmons / Frank Sinatra Eastmancolor film
1958 The Quiet American Audie Murphy / Graham Greene
1959 Suddenly, Last Summer Elizabeth Taylor / Montgomery Clift / Katharine Hepburn
1963 Cleopatra Elizabeth Taylor Color film
1964 Carol for Another Christmas ABC Sterling Hayden / Peter Sellers Television film
1967 The Honey Pot Famous Artists Productions Rex Harrison / Susan Hayward / Maggie Smith Technicolor film
1970 King: a Filmed Record...Montgomery To Memphis Commonwealth United Entertainment Co-directed with Sidney Lumet / Documentary film
There Was a Crooked Man... Warner Bros. Kirk Douglas / Henry Fonda / Hume Cronyn Technicolor film
1972 Sleuth Palomar Pictures Laurence Olivier / Michael Caine Color film
[edit] Writer
* Fast Company (1929) co-writer
* Slightly Scarlet (1930) co-writer
* Paramount on Parade (1930)
* The Social Lion (1931) Adaptation
* Only Saps Work (1931) co-writer
* The Gang Buster (1931)
* Finn & Hattie (1931)
* June Moon (1931) co-writer
* Skippy (1931) co-writer
* Newly Rich (1931) co-writer
* Sooky (1931) co-writer
* This Reckless Age (1932) co-writer
* Sky Bride (1932) co-writer
* Million Dollar Legs (1932) Story
* If I Had A Million (1932) (segments "China Shop", "Three Marines", "Violet") Uncredited
* Diplomaniacs (1933) co-writer
* Emergency Call (1933) co-writer
* Too Much Harmony (1933) Story
* Alice In Wonderland (1933) co-writer
* Manhattan Melodrama (1934) co-writer
* Our Daily Bread (1934) Dialogue
* Forsaking All Others (1934)
* I Live My Life (1935)
* The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) co-writer
* Dragonwyck (1946)
* Somewhere in the Night (1946) co-writer
* A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
* House of Strangers (1949) Uncredited
* No Way Out (1950) co-writer
* All About Eve (1950)
* People Will Talk (1951)
* Julius Caesar (1953) Uncredited
* The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
* Guys and Dolls (1955)
* The Quiet American (1958)
* Cleopatra (1963) co-writer
* The Honey Pot (1967)
[edit] Awards
Year Film Result Category
Academy Awards
1931 Skippy Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay
1941 The Philadelphia Story Nominated Best Picture
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Director
Won Best Original Screenplay
1951 All About Eve Won Best Director
Won Best Original Screenplay
No Way Out Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1953 5 Fingers Nominated Best Director
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1973 Sleuth Nominated Best Director
Directors Guild of America
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1951 All About Eve Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1953 5 Fingers Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1954 Julius Caesar Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1981 Won Honorary Life Member Award
1986 Won Lifetime Achievement Award
Writers Guild of America
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Written American Comedy
1951 All About Eve Won Best Written American Comedy
Nominated Best Written American Drama
No Way Out Nominated The Robert Meltzer Award
1952 People Will Talk Nominated Best Written American Comedy
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Written American Drama
1956 Guys and Dolls Nominated Best Written American Musical
1963 Won Laurel Award for Screen Writing Achievement
[edit] Further reading
* Brodsky, Jack; Nathan Weiss (1963). The Cleopatra Papers. Simon and Schuster.
* Mankiewicz, Joseph L.; Gary Carey (1972). More About 'All About Eve'. Random House.
* Geist, Kenneth L. (1978). Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Scribners. ISBN 0-68415-500-1.
* Cheryl Bray Lower: Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays and Guide to Resources. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co., 2001. ISBN 0-78640-987-8
* Bernard F. Dick: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1983. ISBN 0-80579-291-0
* Oderman, Stuart, Talking to the Piano Player 2. BearManor Media, 2009. ISBN #1-59393-320-7.
[edit] References
1. ^ The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1998. ISBN 0684806207. http://books.google.com/books?id=FVUYAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Franz+Mankiewicz%22&dq=%22Franz+Mankiewicz%22&pgis=1. "Mankiewicz was the youngest of three children born to the German immigrants Franz Mankiewicz, a secondary schoolteacher, and Johanna Blumenau, a homemaker."
2. ^ Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 1983. ISBN 0805792910. "The father, Franz Mankiewicz, emigrated from Germany in 1892, living first in New York and then moving to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in to take a job ..."
3. ^ "Dr. Frank Mankiewicz". New York Times. 1941-12-05. "Mankiewicz, Mr. Frank, dearly beloved husband of Johanna, devoted father of Herman, Joseph, and Mrs. Erna Stenbuck. Services Park West Memorial Chapel, ..."
4. ^ "Joseph Mankiewicz Weds. MGM Producer Marries Rose Stradner, Viennese Actress". New York Times. 1939-07-29. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50C15FA3954107A93CBAB178CD85F4D8385F9. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
5. ^ "Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck, 78, Retired New York Schoolteacher". New York Times. 1979-08-19. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2071FF9355C12728DDDA00994D0405B898BF1D3. Retrieved 2008-07-02. "Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck, a retired, teacher in the New York City schools, died Aug. 1 in Villach, Austria, where she had lived for several years. She was 78 years old. ... She was married in ... to Dr. Joseph Stenbuck, a New York City surgeon who died in 1951. They had no children. She is survived by a brother, Joseph L. ..."
6. ^ "H. J. Mankiewicz, Screenwriter, 56. Winner of Academy Award in 1941 Dies. Playwright Was Former Newspaper Man.". New York Times. 1953-03-06. "His brother, Joseph, is a well known screen author, producer and director. ... A sister, Mrs. Erna Stenbuck of New York, also survives."
7. ^ a b Flint, Peter (1993-02-06). "Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Literate Skeptic of the Cinema, Dies at 83". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5D9113AF935A35751C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print. Retrieved 2007-11-01. "Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer, director and producer who was one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent film makers, died yesterday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 83 and lived in Bedford, N.Y."
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Film career
* 3 Filmography
o 3.1 Director
o 3.2 Writer
* 4 Awards
* 5 Further reading
* 6 References
* 7 External links
[edit] Early life
Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish immigrants from Germany.[1][2][3] He had a sister, Erna Mankiewicz (1901–1979), and a brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who became a screenwriter.[4][5][6]
At age four, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City where he graduated in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School.[7] In 1928, he obtained a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. For a time he worked in Berlin, Germany, as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune newspaper before being lured into the motion picture business.
[edit] Film career
Comfortable in a variety of genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Joseph L. Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylised mise en scène. Mankiewicz worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount and as a producer for MGM before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century-Fox. Over six years he made 11 films for Fox, reaching a peak in 1949 and 1950 when he won consecutive Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve.
During his long career in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote forty-eight screenplays, including All About Eve, for which he won an Academy Award. He also produced more than twenty films including The Philadelphia Story which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941. However, he is best known for the films he directed, twice winning the Academy Award for Directing. In 1944, he produced The Keys of the Kingdom, which starred Gregory Peck, and featured Mankiewicz's then-wife, Rose Stradner, in a supporting role as a nun.
In 1951, Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialised, he continued to make films (both for his own production company Figaro and as a director-for-hire) that explored his favourite themes — the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance and the clash between people's urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.[citation needed]
In 1953, for MGM, he directed Julius Caesar, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, author of the book The Great Movie Stars: The Hollywood Years, called it "perhaps the finest Shakespeare film ever made". The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony, and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
In 1958, Mankiewicz directed The Quiet American an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel about the seed of American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, under career pressure from the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, distorted the message of Greene's book, changing major parts of the story to appeal to a national audience. A cautionary tale about America's blind support for "anti-Communists" was turned into, according to Greene, a "propaganda film for America".[citation needed]
Cleopatra consumed three years of Mankiewicz's life and ended up both derailing his career and causing severe financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. Mankiewicz made more films, however, garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, his final production.[citation needed]
He was the younger brother of Herman J. Mankiewicz. His sons are writer/director Tom Mankiewicz and producer Christopher Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alexandra Mankiewicz. His great-nephew is radio & television personality Ben Mankiewicz, currently on TCM.
Mankiewicz, who died in 1993, six days before his 84th birthday, was interred in Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard cemetery, Bedford, New York.[7]
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Director
Year Title Production company Cast Notes
1946 Dragonwyck 20th Century Fox Gene Tierney / Vincent Price
Backfire Richard Conte / John Ireland
Somewhere in the Night Richard Conte / John Hodiak / Nancy Guild
1947 The Late George Apley Ronald Colman
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Gene Tierney / Rex Harrison / George Sanders
1948 Escape Rex Harrison / Peggy Cummins / William Hartnell
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Jeanne Crain / Linda Darnell / Ann Southern
House of Strangers Edward G. Robinson / Susan Hayward / Richard Conte
1950 No Way Out Richard Widmark / Sidney Poitier / Linda Darnell
All About Eve Bette Davis / Anne Baxter / George Sanders
1951 People Will Talk Cary Grant / Jeanne Crain / Hume Cronyn
1952 5 Fingers James Mason / Danielle Darrieux
1953 Julius Caesar Marlon Brando / James Mason / John Gielgud
1954 The Barefoot Contessa Humphrey Bogart / Ava Gardner Technicolor film
1955 Guys and Dolls Marlon Brando / Jean Simmons / Frank Sinatra Eastmancolor film
1958 The Quiet American Audie Murphy / Graham Greene
1959 Suddenly, Last Summer Elizabeth Taylor / Montgomery Clift / Katharine Hepburn
1963 Cleopatra Elizabeth Taylor Color film
1964 Carol for Another Christmas ABC Sterling Hayden / Peter Sellers Television film
1967 The Honey Pot Famous Artists Productions Rex Harrison / Susan Hayward / Maggie Smith Technicolor film
1970 King: a Filmed Record...Montgomery To Memphis Commonwealth United Entertainment Co-directed with Sidney Lumet / Documentary film
There Was a Crooked Man... Warner Bros. Kirk Douglas / Henry Fonda / Hume Cronyn Technicolor film
1972 Sleuth Palomar Pictures Laurence Olivier / Michael Caine Color film
[edit] Writer
* Fast Company (1929) co-writer
* Slightly Scarlet (1930) co-writer
* Paramount on Parade (1930)
* The Social Lion (1931) Adaptation
* Only Saps Work (1931) co-writer
* The Gang Buster (1931)
* Finn & Hattie (1931)
* June Moon (1931) co-writer
* Skippy (1931) co-writer
* Newly Rich (1931) co-writer
* Sooky (1931) co-writer
* This Reckless Age (1932) co-writer
* Sky Bride (1932) co-writer
* Million Dollar Legs (1932) Story
* If I Had A Million (1932) (segments "China Shop", "Three Marines", "Violet") Uncredited
* Diplomaniacs (1933) co-writer
* Emergency Call (1933) co-writer
* Too Much Harmony (1933) Story
* Alice In Wonderland (1933) co-writer
* Manhattan Melodrama (1934) co-writer
* Our Daily Bread (1934) Dialogue
* Forsaking All Others (1934)
* I Live My Life (1935)
* The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) co-writer
* Dragonwyck (1946)
* Somewhere in the Night (1946) co-writer
* A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
* House of Strangers (1949) Uncredited
* No Way Out (1950) co-writer
* All About Eve (1950)
* People Will Talk (1951)
* Julius Caesar (1953) Uncredited
* The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
* Guys and Dolls (1955)
* The Quiet American (1958)
* Cleopatra (1963) co-writer
* The Honey Pot (1967)
[edit] Awards
Year Film Result Category
Academy Awards
1931 Skippy Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay
1941 The Philadelphia Story Nominated Best Picture
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Director
Won Best Original Screenplay
1951 All About Eve Won Best Director
Won Best Original Screenplay
No Way Out Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1953 5 Fingers Nominated Best Director
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1973 Sleuth Nominated Best Director
Directors Guild of America
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1951 All About Eve Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1953 5 Fingers Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1954 Julius Caesar Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1981 Won Honorary Life Member Award
1986 Won Lifetime Achievement Award
Writers Guild of America
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Written American Comedy
1951 All About Eve Won Best Written American Comedy
Nominated Best Written American Drama
No Way Out Nominated The Robert Meltzer Award
1952 People Will Talk Nominated Best Written American Comedy
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Written American Drama
1956 Guys and Dolls Nominated Best Written American Musical
1963 Won Laurel Award for Screen Writing Achievement
[edit] Further reading
* Brodsky, Jack; Nathan Weiss (1963). The Cleopatra Papers. Simon and Schuster.
* Mankiewicz, Joseph L.; Gary Carey (1972). More About 'All About Eve'. Random House.
* Geist, Kenneth L. (1978). Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Scribners. ISBN 0-68415-500-1.
* Cheryl Bray Lower: Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays and Guide to Resources. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co., 2001. ISBN 0-78640-987-8
* Bernard F. Dick: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1983. ISBN 0-80579-291-0
* Oderman, Stuart, Talking to the Piano Player 2. BearManor Media, 2009. ISBN #1-59393-320-7.
[edit] References
1. ^ The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1998. ISBN 0684806207. http://books.google.com/books?id=FVUYAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Franz+Mankiewicz%22&dq=%22Franz+Mankiewicz%22&pgis=1. "Mankiewicz was the youngest of three children born to the German immigrants Franz Mankiewicz, a secondary schoolteacher, and Johanna Blumenau, a homemaker."
2. ^ Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 1983. ISBN 0805792910. "The father, Franz Mankiewicz, emigrated from Germany in 1892, living first in New York and then moving to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in to take a job ..."
3. ^ "Dr. Frank Mankiewicz". New York Times. 1941-12-05. "Mankiewicz, Mr. Frank, dearly beloved husband of Johanna, devoted father of Herman, Joseph, and Mrs. Erna Stenbuck. Services Park West Memorial Chapel, ..."
4. ^ "Joseph Mankiewicz Weds. MGM Producer Marries Rose Stradner, Viennese Actress". New York Times. 1939-07-29. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50C15FA3954107A93CBAB178CD85F4D8385F9. Retrieved 2008-07-02.
5. ^ "Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck, 78, Retired New York Schoolteacher". New York Times. 1979-08-19. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2071FF9355C12728DDDA00994D0405B898BF1D3. Retrieved 2008-07-02. "Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck, a retired, teacher in the New York City schools, died Aug. 1 in Villach, Austria, where she had lived for several years. She was 78 years old. ... She was married in ... to Dr. Joseph Stenbuck, a New York City surgeon who died in 1951. They had no children. She is survived by a brother, Joseph L. ..."
6. ^ "H. J. Mankiewicz, Screenwriter, 56. Winner of Academy Award in 1941 Dies. Playwright Was Former Newspaper Man.". New York Times. 1953-03-06. "His brother, Joseph, is a well known screen author, producer and director. ... A sister, Mrs. Erna Stenbuck of New York, also survives."
7. ^ a b Flint, Peter (1993-02-06). "Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Literate Skeptic of the Cinema, Dies at 83". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5D9113AF935A35751C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print. Retrieved 2007-11-01. "Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer, director and producer who was one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent film makers, died yesterday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 83 and lived in Bedford, N.Y."
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austrian-born American artist, journalist, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.[1] Wilder is one of only five people who have won three Academy Awards for producing, directing and writing the same film (The Apartment).
He first became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit as a co-writer of the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies.[2] Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life and career
o 1.1 Austria and Germany
o 1.2 Hollywood career
o 1.3 Directorial style
o 1.4 Later life
o 1.5 Legacy
* 2 Filmography
* 3 Awards
* 4 Academy Award Nominations
* 5 Notes
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Literature
* 9 External links
[edit] Life and career
[edit] Austria and Germany
Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha Beskidzka, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) to Max Wilder and Eugenia Dittler, Wilder was nicknamed Billie by his mother (he changed that to "Billy" after arriving in America). His parents had a successful and well-known cake shop in Sucha Beskidzka's train station and unsuccessfully tried to convince their son to inherit the business. Soon the family moved to Vienna, where Wilder attended school. After dropping out of the University of Vienna, Wilder became a journalist. To advance his career Wilder decided to move to Berlin, Germany. While in Berlin, before achieving success as a writer, Wilder allegedly worked as a taxi dancer[3][4].
After writing crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers, he was eventually offered a regular job at a Berlin tabloid. Developing an interest in film, he began working as a screenwriter. He collaborated with several other tyros (with Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak on the 1929 feature People on Sunday). After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut with the 1934 film Mauvaise Graine. He relocated to Hollywood prior to its release. His mother, grandmother, and stepfather perished at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[edit] Hollywood career
After arriving in Hollywood in 1933, Wilder continued his career as a screenwriter. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1934. Wilder's first significant success was Ninotchka in 1939, a collaboration with fellow German immigrant Ernst Lubitsch. This screwball comedy starred Greta Garbo (generally known as a tragic heroine in film melodramas), and was popularly and critically acclaimed. With the byline, "Garbo Laughs!", it also took Garbo's career in a new direction. The film also marked Wilder's first Academy Award nomination, which he shared with co-writer Charles Brackett (although he and Brackett had already written Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and Midnight to great acclaim). For twelve years Wilder co-wrote many of his films with Brackett, from 1938 through 1950. He followed Ninotchka with a series of box office hits in 1942, including his Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire, as well as his directorial feature debut, The Major and the Minor.
Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler, with whom he did not get along. Double Indemnity not only set conventions for the noir genre (such as "venetian blind" lighting and voice-over narration), but was also a landmark in the battle against Hollywood censorship. The original James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity featured two love triangles and a murder plotted for insurance money. The book was highly popular with the reading public, but had been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code, because adultery was central to its plot. Double Indemnity is credited by some as the first true film noir, combining the stylistic elements of Citizen Kane with the narrative elements of The Maltese Falcon. Wilder was the Editors Supervisor in the 1945 US Army Signal Corps documentary/propaganda film Death Mills.
Two years later, Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, the first major American film to make a serious examination of alcoholism, another difficult theme under the Production Code. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the dark and cynical and critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, which paired rising star William Holden with Gloria Swanson. Swanson played Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star who dreams of a comeback; Holden is an aspiring screenwriter who becomes a kept man.
In 1951, Wilder followed Sunset Boulevard with Ace in the Hole (a/k/a The Big Carnival), a tale of media exploitation of a caving accident. It was a critical and commercial failure at the time, but its reputation has grown over the years. In the fifties, Wilder also directed two adaptations of Broadway plays, the POW drama Stalag 17 (1953), which resulted in a Best Actor Oscar for William Holden, and the Agatha Christie mystery Witness for the Prosecution (1957). In the mid 1950s, Wilder became interested in doing a film with one of the classic slapstick comedy acts of the Hollywood Golden Age. He first considered, and rejected, a project to star Laurel and Hardy. He then held discussions with Groucho Marx concerning a new Marx Brothers comedy, tentatively titled "A Day at the U.N." This project was abandoned when Chico Marx died in 1961.[5]
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies.[2] Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954). Wilder's humor is sometimes sardonic. In Love in the Afternoon (1957), a young and innocent Audrey Hepburn doesn't want to be young or innocent with playboy Gary Cooper, and pretends to be a married woman in search of extramarital amusement.
In 1959 Wilder introduced crossdressing to American film audiences with Some Like It Hot. In this comedy Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians on the run from a Chicago gang, who disguise themselves as women and become romantically involved with Marilyn Monroe and Joe E. Brown. In 1959, Wilder began to collaborate with writer-producer I.A.L. Diamond, an association that continued until the end of both men's careers. After winning three Academy Awards for 1960's The Apartment (for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay), Wilder's career slowed. His Cold War farce One, Two, Three (1961) featured a rousing comic performance by James Cagney, but was followed by the lesser films Irma la Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid. Wilder garnered his last Oscar nomination for his screenplay The Fortune Cookie in 1966. His 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was intended as a major roadshow release, but was heavily cut by the studio and has never been fully restored. Later films such as Fedora and Buddy Buddy failed to impress critics or the public.
After that Wilder never ceased to complain that Hollywood was making a big mistake by not giving him any films to direct. He did so at film festivals, in interviews, on television, and whenever else he had the chance. He often hinted that he was being discriminated against, due to his age. His complaining didn't help: for whatever reason, Hollywood simply wouldn't hire him, and his directorial career ended. One "consolation" which Wilder had in his later years, besides his art collection (see "Trivia," below), was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stage version of "Sunset Boulevard." The musical itself had an uneven success and is generally considered to be one of the least of Webber's musicals. However, the huge amount of money and energy thrown into the musical was definitely a tribute to Wilder's work.
[edit] Directorial style
Wilder's directorial choices reflected his belief in the primacy of writing. He avoided the exuberant cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles because, in Wilder's opinion, shots that called attention to themselves would distract the audience from the story. Wilder's pictures have tight plotting and memorable dialogue. Despite his conservative directorial style, his subject matter often pushed the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. Wilder was skilled at working with actors, coaxing silent era legends Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim out of retirement for roles in Sunset Boulevard. For Stalag 17, Wilder squeezed an Oscar-winning performance out of a reluctant William Holden (Holden wanted to make his character more likeable; Wilder refused). Wilder sometimes cast against type for major parts such as Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. Many today know MacMurray as a wholesome family man from the television series My Three Sons, but he played a womanizing schemer in Wilder's films. Humphrey Bogart shed his tough guy image to give one of his warmest performances in Sabrina. James Cagney, not usually known for comedy, was memorable in a high-octane comic role for Wilder's One, Two, Three. Wilder coaxed a very effective, and in some ways memorable performance out of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.
In total, he directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Robert Strauss, Audrey Hepburn, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, Jack Kruschen, Shirley MacLaine and Walter Matthau. Milland, Holden and Matthau won Oscars for their performances in Wilder films. Wilder mentored Jack Lemmon and was the first director to pair him with Walter Matthau, in The Fortune Cookie (1966). Wilder had great respect for Lemmon, calling him the hardest working actor he had ever met. Lemmon starred in seven of Wilder's films.
Wilder's work has had to meet some critical challenges. Although he is widely admired by critics and filmgoers, he has not won approval from noted critic David Thomson, author of "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," and other works. Thomson summarizes his attitude toward Wilder by saying, "I remain skeptical." Thomson emphasizes that, although Wilder created some brilliant films, he also directed some poor ones, especially at the end of his career. Thomson notes that critic Andrew Sarris did not approve of Wilder for a long time but then changed his attitude much later.
Wilder's films often lacked any discernible political tone or sympathies, which was not unintentional. He was less interested in current political fashions than in human nature and the issues that confronted ordinary people. He was not affected by the Hollywood blacklist, and had little sympathy for those who were. Of the blacklisted 'Hollywood Ten' Wilder famously quipped, "Of the ten, two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly". Wilder reveled in poking fun at those who took politics too seriously. In Ball of Fire, his burlesque queen 'Sugarpuss' points at her sore throat and complains "Pink? It's as red as the Daily Worker and twice as sore." Later, she gives the overbearing and unsmiling housemaid the name "Franco." Wilder is sometimes confused with director William Wyler; the confusion is understandable, as both were German-speaking Jews with similar backgrounds and names. However, their output as directors was quite different, with Wyler preferring to direct epics and heavy dramas and Wilder noted for his comedies and film noir type dramas.
[edit] Later life
Wilder was recognized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Wilder became well known for owning one of the finest and most extensive art collections in Hollywood, mainly collecting modern art. As he described it in the mid 80’s, “It’s a sickness. I don’t know how to stop myself. Call it bulimia if you want – or curiosity or passion. I have some Impressionists, some Picassos from every period, some mobiles by Calder. I also collect tiny Japanese trees, glass paperweights and Chinese vases. Name an object and I collect it.” [6] A few years before he died, Wilder agreed to a sale of most of the collection at an auction, netting a very large sum of money. He said that he was not selling the art to make money, but that he had enjoyed it as much as he could; he wanted others to have a chance to own it.
Wilder’s artistic ambitions led him to create a series of works all his own. By the early 90’s, Wilder had amassed a beguiling assortment of plastic-artistic constructions, many of which were made in collaboration with artist Bruce Houston. In 1993, art dealer Louis Stern, a long time friend, helped organize an exhibition of Wilder’s work at his Beverly Hills gallery. The exhibition was entitled Billy Wilder’s Marché aux Puces and the Variations on the Theme of Queen Nefertete segment was an unqualified crowd pleaser. This series featured busts of the ravishing Egyptian queen wrapped a la Christo or splattered a la Pollack or sporting a Campbell’s soup can in homage to Warhol. [7]
Wilder died in 2002 of pneumonia at the age of 95 after battling health problems, including cancer, in Los Angeles, California and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, California near Jack Lemmon. Marilyn Monroe's crypt is located in the same cemetery. Wilder died the same day as two other comedy legends: Milton Berle and Dudley Moore. The next day, French top-ranking newspaper Le Monde titled its first-page obituary, "Billy Wilder is dead. Nobody is perfect." This was a reference to the famous closing line of his film Some Like it Hot spoken by Joe E. Brown after Jack Lemmon reveals he is not female.
[edit] Legacy
Wilder's gravestone
Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter. He is responsible for two of the film noir era's most definitive films in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Along with Woody Allen, he leads the list of films on the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest American films with 5 films written and holds the honor of holding the top spot with Some Like it Hot. Also on the list are The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch which he directed, and Ball of Fire and Ninotchka which he co-wrote. The American Film Institute has ranked four of Wilder's films among their top 100 American films of the 20th century: Sunset Boulevard (no. 12), Some Like It Hot (no. 14), Double Indemnity (no. 38) and The Apartment (no. 93). For the tenth anniversary edition of their list, the AFI moved Sunset Blvd. to #16, Some Like it Hot to #22, Double Indemnity to #29 and The Apartment to #80.
Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba said in his acceptance speech for the 1993 Best Non-English Speaking Film Oscar: "I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder... so, thank you Mr. Wilder." According to Trueba, Wilder called him the day after and told him: "Fernando, it's God." Wilder's 12 Academy Award nominations for screenwriting were a record until 1997 when Woody Allen received a 13th nomination for Deconstructing Harry.
[edit] Filmography
Main article: Billy Wilder filmography
[edit] Awards
With eight nominations for Best Director, Wilder is the second most nominated director in the history of the Academy Awards, behind William Wyler. Out of these nominations, Wilder won two Oscars.
[edit] Academy Award Nominations
Year Award Film Result
1939 Best Writing, Screenplay Ninotchka Sidney Howard – Gone with the Wind
1941 Best Writing, Screenplay Hold Back the Dawn Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller – Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Best Writing, Original Story Ball of Fire Harry Segall – Here Comes Mr. Jordan
1944 Best Director Double Indemnity Leo McCarey – Going My Way
Best Writing, Screenplay Frank Butler and Frank Cavett – Going My Way
1945 Best Director The Lost Weekend Won
Best Writing, Screenplay Won
1948 Best Writing, Screenplay A Foreign Affair John Huston – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950 Best Director Sunset Boulevard Joseph L. Mankiewicz – All About Eve
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Won
1951 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Ace in the Hole Alan Jay Lerner – An American in Paris
1953 Best Director Stalag 17 Fred Zinnemann – From Here to Eternity
1954 Best Director Sabrina Elia Kazan – On the Waterfront
Best Writing, Screenplay George Seaton – The Country Girl
1957 Best Director Witness for the Prosecution David Lean – The Bridge on the River Kwai
1959 Best Director Some Like It Hot William Wyler – Ben-Hur
Best Writing, Screenplay
Based on Material from Another Medium Neil Paterson – Room at the Top
1960 Best Motion Picture The Apartment Won
Best Director Won
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
Written Directly for the Screen Won
1966 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
Written Directly for the Screen The Fortune Cookie Claude Lelouch – A Man and a Woman
1987
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
Won
[edit] Notes
1. ^ http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com/pages/movie-pages/movie_directors.html
2. ^ a b Cook, David A. (2004). A History of Narrative: Film Fourth Edition. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-97868-0.
3. ^ Philips, Alastair. City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris, 1929-1939. Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Page 190.
4. ^ Silvester, Christopher. The Grove Book of Hollywood. Grove Press, 2002. Page 311
5. ^ Gore, Chris (1999). The Fifty Greatest Movies Never Made, New York: St. Martin's Griffin
6. ^ On Sunset Boulevard – the Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Ed Sikov, “ In Turnaround”, pg. 582.
7. ^ Nobody’s Perfect, Billy Wilder – A Personal Biography, Charlotte Chandler, “Nefertete”, pg. 317.
[edit] See also
* Billy Wilder filmography
* List of film collaborations
* David Niven
* Ruth Chatterton
* Laurence Olivier
[edit] References
* Clinton, Paul (2002-03-29). "Legendary director Billy Wilder dead at 95". CNN. http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/28/billy.wilder.obit/. Retrieved January 20, 2006.
[edit] Literature
* Armstrong, Richard, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist (McFarland & Company, Inc.: 2000)
* Dan Auiler, "Some Like it Hot" (Taschen, 2001)
* Chandler, Charlotte, Nobody's Perfect. Billy Wilder. A Personal Biography (New York: Schuster & Schuster, 2002)
* Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Knopf, 2001)
* Guilbert, Georges-Claude, Literary Readings of Billy Wilder (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
* Hermsdorf, Daniel, Billy Wilder. Filme - Motive - Kontroverses (Bochum: Paragon-Verlag, 2006)
* Hopp, Glenn, Billy Wilder (Pocket Essentials: 2001)
* Hopp, Glenn / Duncan, Paul, Billy Wilder (Köln / New York: Taschen, 2003)
* Horton, Robert, Billy Wilder Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001)
* Hutter, Andreas / Kamolz, Klaus, Billie Wilder. Eine europäische Karriere (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Boehlau, 1998)
* Gyurko, Lanin A., The Shattered Screen. Myth and Demythification in the Art of Carlos Fuentes and Billy Wilder (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2009)
* Jacobs, Jérôme, Billy Wilder (Paris: Rivages Cinéma, 2006)
* Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (Henry Holt & Co: 1st ed edition, May 1996)
* Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard. The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1999)
* Neil Sinyard & Adrian Turner, "Journey Down Sunset Boulevard" (BCW, Isle of Wight, UK, 1979)
* Wood, Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1969)
* Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions, 2004)
* Hellmuth Karasek, Billy Wilder, eine Nahaufnahme (Heyne, 2002)
He first became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit as a co-writer of the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies.[2] Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life and career
o 1.1 Austria and Germany
o 1.2 Hollywood career
o 1.3 Directorial style
o 1.4 Later life
o 1.5 Legacy
* 2 Filmography
* 3 Awards
* 4 Academy Award Nominations
* 5 Notes
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Literature
* 9 External links
[edit] Life and career
[edit] Austria and Germany
Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha Beskidzka, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) to Max Wilder and Eugenia Dittler, Wilder was nicknamed Billie by his mother (he changed that to "Billy" after arriving in America). His parents had a successful and well-known cake shop in Sucha Beskidzka's train station and unsuccessfully tried to convince their son to inherit the business. Soon the family moved to Vienna, where Wilder attended school. After dropping out of the University of Vienna, Wilder became a journalist. To advance his career Wilder decided to move to Berlin, Germany. While in Berlin, before achieving success as a writer, Wilder allegedly worked as a taxi dancer[3][4].
After writing crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers, he was eventually offered a regular job at a Berlin tabloid. Developing an interest in film, he began working as a screenwriter. He collaborated with several other tyros (with Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak on the 1929 feature People on Sunday). After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut with the 1934 film Mauvaise Graine. He relocated to Hollywood prior to its release. His mother, grandmother, and stepfather perished at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[edit] Hollywood career
After arriving in Hollywood in 1933, Wilder continued his career as a screenwriter. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1934. Wilder's first significant success was Ninotchka in 1939, a collaboration with fellow German immigrant Ernst Lubitsch. This screwball comedy starred Greta Garbo (generally known as a tragic heroine in film melodramas), and was popularly and critically acclaimed. With the byline, "Garbo Laughs!", it also took Garbo's career in a new direction. The film also marked Wilder's first Academy Award nomination, which he shared with co-writer Charles Brackett (although he and Brackett had already written Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and Midnight to great acclaim). For twelve years Wilder co-wrote many of his films with Brackett, from 1938 through 1950. He followed Ninotchka with a series of box office hits in 1942, including his Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire, as well as his directorial feature debut, The Major and the Minor.
Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler, with whom he did not get along. Double Indemnity not only set conventions for the noir genre (such as "venetian blind" lighting and voice-over narration), but was also a landmark in the battle against Hollywood censorship. The original James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity featured two love triangles and a murder plotted for insurance money. The book was highly popular with the reading public, but had been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code, because adultery was central to its plot. Double Indemnity is credited by some as the first true film noir, combining the stylistic elements of Citizen Kane with the narrative elements of The Maltese Falcon. Wilder was the Editors Supervisor in the 1945 US Army Signal Corps documentary/propaganda film Death Mills.
Two years later, Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, the first major American film to make a serious examination of alcoholism, another difficult theme under the Production Code. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the dark and cynical and critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, which paired rising star William Holden with Gloria Swanson. Swanson played Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star who dreams of a comeback; Holden is an aspiring screenwriter who becomes a kept man.
In 1951, Wilder followed Sunset Boulevard with Ace in the Hole (a/k/a The Big Carnival), a tale of media exploitation of a caving accident. It was a critical and commercial failure at the time, but its reputation has grown over the years. In the fifties, Wilder also directed two adaptations of Broadway plays, the POW drama Stalag 17 (1953), which resulted in a Best Actor Oscar for William Holden, and the Agatha Christie mystery Witness for the Prosecution (1957). In the mid 1950s, Wilder became interested in doing a film with one of the classic slapstick comedy acts of the Hollywood Golden Age. He first considered, and rejected, a project to star Laurel and Hardy. He then held discussions with Groucho Marx concerning a new Marx Brothers comedy, tentatively titled "A Day at the U.N." This project was abandoned when Chico Marx died in 1961.[5]
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies.[2] Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954). Wilder's humor is sometimes sardonic. In Love in the Afternoon (1957), a young and innocent Audrey Hepburn doesn't want to be young or innocent with playboy Gary Cooper, and pretends to be a married woman in search of extramarital amusement.
In 1959 Wilder introduced crossdressing to American film audiences with Some Like It Hot. In this comedy Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians on the run from a Chicago gang, who disguise themselves as women and become romantically involved with Marilyn Monroe and Joe E. Brown. In 1959, Wilder began to collaborate with writer-producer I.A.L. Diamond, an association that continued until the end of both men's careers. After winning three Academy Awards for 1960's The Apartment (for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay), Wilder's career slowed. His Cold War farce One, Two, Three (1961) featured a rousing comic performance by James Cagney, but was followed by the lesser films Irma la Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid. Wilder garnered his last Oscar nomination for his screenplay The Fortune Cookie in 1966. His 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was intended as a major roadshow release, but was heavily cut by the studio and has never been fully restored. Later films such as Fedora and Buddy Buddy failed to impress critics or the public.
After that Wilder never ceased to complain that Hollywood was making a big mistake by not giving him any films to direct. He did so at film festivals, in interviews, on television, and whenever else he had the chance. He often hinted that he was being discriminated against, due to his age. His complaining didn't help: for whatever reason, Hollywood simply wouldn't hire him, and his directorial career ended. One "consolation" which Wilder had in his later years, besides his art collection (see "Trivia," below), was the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stage version of "Sunset Boulevard." The musical itself had an uneven success and is generally considered to be one of the least of Webber's musicals. However, the huge amount of money and energy thrown into the musical was definitely a tribute to Wilder's work.
[edit] Directorial style
Wilder's directorial choices reflected his belief in the primacy of writing. He avoided the exuberant cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles because, in Wilder's opinion, shots that called attention to themselves would distract the audience from the story. Wilder's pictures have tight plotting and memorable dialogue. Despite his conservative directorial style, his subject matter often pushed the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. Wilder was skilled at working with actors, coaxing silent era legends Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim out of retirement for roles in Sunset Boulevard. For Stalag 17, Wilder squeezed an Oscar-winning performance out of a reluctant William Holden (Holden wanted to make his character more likeable; Wilder refused). Wilder sometimes cast against type for major parts such as Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. Many today know MacMurray as a wholesome family man from the television series My Three Sons, but he played a womanizing schemer in Wilder's films. Humphrey Bogart shed his tough guy image to give one of his warmest performances in Sabrina. James Cagney, not usually known for comedy, was memorable in a high-octane comic role for Wilder's One, Two, Three. Wilder coaxed a very effective, and in some ways memorable performance out of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.
In total, he directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Robert Strauss, Audrey Hepburn, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, Jack Kruschen, Shirley MacLaine and Walter Matthau. Milland, Holden and Matthau won Oscars for their performances in Wilder films. Wilder mentored Jack Lemmon and was the first director to pair him with Walter Matthau, in The Fortune Cookie (1966). Wilder had great respect for Lemmon, calling him the hardest working actor he had ever met. Lemmon starred in seven of Wilder's films.
Wilder's work has had to meet some critical challenges. Although he is widely admired by critics and filmgoers, he has not won approval from noted critic David Thomson, author of "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," and other works. Thomson summarizes his attitude toward Wilder by saying, "I remain skeptical." Thomson emphasizes that, although Wilder created some brilliant films, he also directed some poor ones, especially at the end of his career. Thomson notes that critic Andrew Sarris did not approve of Wilder for a long time but then changed his attitude much later.
Wilder's films often lacked any discernible political tone or sympathies, which was not unintentional. He was less interested in current political fashions than in human nature and the issues that confronted ordinary people. He was not affected by the Hollywood blacklist, and had little sympathy for those who were. Of the blacklisted 'Hollywood Ten' Wilder famously quipped, "Of the ten, two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly". Wilder reveled in poking fun at those who took politics too seriously. In Ball of Fire, his burlesque queen 'Sugarpuss' points at her sore throat and complains "Pink? It's as red as the Daily Worker and twice as sore." Later, she gives the overbearing and unsmiling housemaid the name "Franco." Wilder is sometimes confused with director William Wyler; the confusion is understandable, as both were German-speaking Jews with similar backgrounds and names. However, their output as directors was quite different, with Wyler preferring to direct epics and heavy dramas and Wilder noted for his comedies and film noir type dramas.
[edit] Later life
Wilder was recognized with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Wilder became well known for owning one of the finest and most extensive art collections in Hollywood, mainly collecting modern art. As he described it in the mid 80’s, “It’s a sickness. I don’t know how to stop myself. Call it bulimia if you want – or curiosity or passion. I have some Impressionists, some Picassos from every period, some mobiles by Calder. I also collect tiny Japanese trees, glass paperweights and Chinese vases. Name an object and I collect it.” [6] A few years before he died, Wilder agreed to a sale of most of the collection at an auction, netting a very large sum of money. He said that he was not selling the art to make money, but that he had enjoyed it as much as he could; he wanted others to have a chance to own it.
Wilder’s artistic ambitions led him to create a series of works all his own. By the early 90’s, Wilder had amassed a beguiling assortment of plastic-artistic constructions, many of which were made in collaboration with artist Bruce Houston. In 1993, art dealer Louis Stern, a long time friend, helped organize an exhibition of Wilder’s work at his Beverly Hills gallery. The exhibition was entitled Billy Wilder’s Marché aux Puces and the Variations on the Theme of Queen Nefertete segment was an unqualified crowd pleaser. This series featured busts of the ravishing Egyptian queen wrapped a la Christo or splattered a la Pollack or sporting a Campbell’s soup can in homage to Warhol. [7]
Wilder died in 2002 of pneumonia at the age of 95 after battling health problems, including cancer, in Los Angeles, California and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, California near Jack Lemmon. Marilyn Monroe's crypt is located in the same cemetery. Wilder died the same day as two other comedy legends: Milton Berle and Dudley Moore. The next day, French top-ranking newspaper Le Monde titled its first-page obituary, "Billy Wilder is dead. Nobody is perfect." This was a reference to the famous closing line of his film Some Like it Hot spoken by Joe E. Brown after Jack Lemmon reveals he is not female.
[edit] Legacy
Wilder's gravestone
Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter. He is responsible for two of the film noir era's most definitive films in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Along with Woody Allen, he leads the list of films on the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest American films with 5 films written and holds the honor of holding the top spot with Some Like it Hot. Also on the list are The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch which he directed, and Ball of Fire and Ninotchka which he co-wrote. The American Film Institute has ranked four of Wilder's films among their top 100 American films of the 20th century: Sunset Boulevard (no. 12), Some Like It Hot (no. 14), Double Indemnity (no. 38) and The Apartment (no. 93). For the tenth anniversary edition of their list, the AFI moved Sunset Blvd. to #16, Some Like it Hot to #22, Double Indemnity to #29 and The Apartment to #80.
Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba said in his acceptance speech for the 1993 Best Non-English Speaking Film Oscar: "I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder... so, thank you Mr. Wilder." According to Trueba, Wilder called him the day after and told him: "Fernando, it's God." Wilder's 12 Academy Award nominations for screenwriting were a record until 1997 when Woody Allen received a 13th nomination for Deconstructing Harry.
[edit] Filmography
Main article: Billy Wilder filmography
[edit] Awards
With eight nominations for Best Director, Wilder is the second most nominated director in the history of the Academy Awards, behind William Wyler. Out of these nominations, Wilder won two Oscars.
[edit] Academy Award Nominations
Year Award Film Result
1939 Best Writing, Screenplay Ninotchka Sidney Howard – Gone with the Wind
1941 Best Writing, Screenplay Hold Back the Dawn Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller – Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Best Writing, Original Story Ball of Fire Harry Segall – Here Comes Mr. Jordan
1944 Best Director Double Indemnity Leo McCarey – Going My Way
Best Writing, Screenplay Frank Butler and Frank Cavett – Going My Way
1945 Best Director The Lost Weekend Won
Best Writing, Screenplay Won
1948 Best Writing, Screenplay A Foreign Affair John Huston – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950 Best Director Sunset Boulevard Joseph L. Mankiewicz – All About Eve
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Won
1951 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Ace in the Hole Alan Jay Lerner – An American in Paris
1953 Best Director Stalag 17 Fred Zinnemann – From Here to Eternity
1954 Best Director Sabrina Elia Kazan – On the Waterfront
Best Writing, Screenplay George Seaton – The Country Girl
1957 Best Director Witness for the Prosecution David Lean – The Bridge on the River Kwai
1959 Best Director Some Like It Hot William Wyler – Ben-Hur
Best Writing, Screenplay
Based on Material from Another Medium Neil Paterson – Room at the Top
1960 Best Motion Picture The Apartment Won
Best Director Won
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
Written Directly for the Screen Won
1966 Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
Written Directly for the Screen The Fortune Cookie Claude Lelouch – A Man and a Woman
1987
Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award
Won
[edit] Notes
1. ^ http://digitaldreamdoor.nutsie.com/pages/movie-pages/movie_directors.html
2. ^ a b Cook, David A. (2004). A History of Narrative: Film Fourth Edition. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-97868-0.
3. ^ Philips, Alastair. City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris, 1929-1939. Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Page 190.
4. ^ Silvester, Christopher. The Grove Book of Hollywood. Grove Press, 2002. Page 311
5. ^ Gore, Chris (1999). The Fifty Greatest Movies Never Made, New York: St. Martin's Griffin
6. ^ On Sunset Boulevard – the Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Ed Sikov, “ In Turnaround”, pg. 582.
7. ^ Nobody’s Perfect, Billy Wilder – A Personal Biography, Charlotte Chandler, “Nefertete”, pg. 317.
[edit] See also
* Billy Wilder filmography
* List of film collaborations
* David Niven
* Ruth Chatterton
* Laurence Olivier
[edit] References
* Clinton, Paul (2002-03-29). "Legendary director Billy Wilder dead at 95". CNN. http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/28/billy.wilder.obit/. Retrieved January 20, 2006.
[edit] Literature
* Armstrong, Richard, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist (McFarland & Company, Inc.: 2000)
* Dan Auiler, "Some Like it Hot" (Taschen, 2001)
* Chandler, Charlotte, Nobody's Perfect. Billy Wilder. A Personal Biography (New York: Schuster & Schuster, 2002)
* Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Knopf, 2001)
* Guilbert, Georges-Claude, Literary Readings of Billy Wilder (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007)
* Hermsdorf, Daniel, Billy Wilder. Filme - Motive - Kontroverses (Bochum: Paragon-Verlag, 2006)
* Hopp, Glenn, Billy Wilder (Pocket Essentials: 2001)
* Hopp, Glenn / Duncan, Paul, Billy Wilder (Köln / New York: Taschen, 2003)
* Horton, Robert, Billy Wilder Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001)
* Hutter, Andreas / Kamolz, Klaus, Billie Wilder. Eine europäische Karriere (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Boehlau, 1998)
* Gyurko, Lanin A., The Shattered Screen. Myth and Demythification in the Art of Carlos Fuentes and Billy Wilder (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2009)
* Jacobs, Jérôme, Billy Wilder (Paris: Rivages Cinéma, 2006)
* Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (Henry Holt & Co: 1st ed edition, May 1996)
* Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard. The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1999)
* Neil Sinyard & Adrian Turner, "Journey Down Sunset Boulevard" (BCW, Isle of Wight, UK, 1979)
* Wood, Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1969)
* Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions, 2004)
* Hellmuth Karasek, Billy Wilder, eine Nahaufnahme (Heyne, 2002)
Jules Dassin
ules Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008), born Julius Dassin, was an American film director. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Hollywood Blacklist
* 3 Personal life
o 3.1 Affiliation with Greece
* 4 Awards and honors
* 5 Filmography
* 6 References
* 7 External links
[edit] Early life
One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death.
[edit] Career
Dassin quickly became better known for his noir films Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves' Highway in the 1940s, which helped him to become "one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era."[1]
Dassin's most influential film was Rififi, an early work in the "heist film" genre. It inspired later heist films, such as Ocean's Eleven and Mission: Impossible.[1]
[edit] Hollywood Blacklist
Main article: Hollywood Blacklist
Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood during the production of Night and the City in 1950. He was not allowed on the studio property to edit or oversee the musical score for the film. He had trouble even finding work abroad, as U.S. distribution companies would threaten not to distribute any European film with blacklisted participants. After 1950, Dassin was unable to work as a director until Rififi in 1955 (a French production). Most of Dassin's films in the decades following the blacklist are European productions.[1] His prolific later career in Europe and the affiliation with Greece through his second wife, combined with a common pronunciation of his surname as "Da-SAN" in Europe, as opposed to "DASS-in" in the US leads to a common misconception that he is a Greek, or possibly French, director who made a few films in the US early in his career.
[edit] Personal life
Jules Dassin was married to:
* Béatrice Launer, a Hungarian-born violinist (aka Beatrice Launer-Dassin). They married in 1933 and divorced in 1962. Their children were: Joseph Ira Dassin (1938–1980), a popular French singer in the 1970s, songwriter Richelle "Rickie" Dassin (born 1940), and actress-singer Julie Dassin (born 1944 and also known as Julie D.).[1]
* Melina Mercouri, Greek actress and former wife of Panos Harokopos. They married in 1966.
[edit] Affiliation with Greece
He was considered a major Philhellene to the point of Greek officials describing him as a "first generation Greek". Along with his last wife, Melina Mercouri, he opposed the Greek military junta. A major supporter of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens, for which he established the Melina Mercouri Institution in her memory, he missed the opening ceremony of the New Acropolis Museum by only a few months due to his death at the age of 96.[2]
Upon his death, the Greek prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, released a statement: "Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and true friend. His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."[1]
[edit] Awards and honors
For his 1956 film Rififi, Dassin earned the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.[1] His 1960 film Never on Sunday earned the music Academy Award (Manos Hadjidakis, Ta Paidia tou Peiraia), and the Cannes Film Festival best actress award (Melina Mercouri).[2][3]
[edit] Filmography
Year Film Credited as
Director Producer Writer Actor Role
1941 The Tell-Tale Heart Yes
1942 Nazi Agent Yes
The Affairs of Martha Yes
Reunion in France Yes
1943 Young Ideas Yes
1944 The Canterville Ghost Yes
1946 Two Smart People Yes
A Letter for Evie Yes
1947 Brute Force Yes
1948 The Naked City Yes
1949 Thieves' Highway Yes
1950 Night and the City Yes
1955 Rififi Yes Yes Yes Cesar le Milanais
1957 He Who Must Die Yes Yes
1959 The Law Yes Yes
1960 Never on Sunday Yes Yes Yes Yes Homer Thrace
1962 Phaedra Yes Yes Yes Yes Christo
1964 Topkapi Yes Yes Yes Turkish cop
1966 10:30 P.M. Summer Yes Yes Yes
1968 Survival 1967 Yes Yes
Up Tight! Yes Yes Yes
1970 Promise at Dawn Yes Yes Yes Yes Ivan Mozzhukhin
1974 The Rehearsal Yes Yes Yes
1978 A Dream of Passion Yes Yes Yes
1980 Circle of Two Yes
[edit] References
1. ^ a b c d e Luther, Claudia (April 1, 2008). "Blacklisted Director Jules Dassin Dies at 96". The Times. http://www.zap2it.com/celebrities/news/zap-julesdassinobit,0,5046745.story.
2. ^ a b (Greek) Skai News, Απεβίωσε ο Ζυλ Ντασέν (Jules Dassin died), English (machine translation) Retrieved on 2008-04-01.
3. ^ Internet Movie Database, Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), Retrieved on 2008-04-01.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early life
* 2 Career
o 2.1 Hollywood Blacklist
* 3 Personal life
o 3.1 Affiliation with Greece
* 4 Awards and honors
* 5 Filmography
* 6 References
* 7 External links
[edit] Early life
One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death.
[edit] Career
Dassin quickly became better known for his noir films Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves' Highway in the 1940s, which helped him to become "one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era."[1]
Dassin's most influential film was Rififi, an early work in the "heist film" genre. It inspired later heist films, such as Ocean's Eleven and Mission: Impossible.[1]
[edit] Hollywood Blacklist
Main article: Hollywood Blacklist
Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood during the production of Night and the City in 1950. He was not allowed on the studio property to edit or oversee the musical score for the film. He had trouble even finding work abroad, as U.S. distribution companies would threaten not to distribute any European film with blacklisted participants. After 1950, Dassin was unable to work as a director until Rififi in 1955 (a French production). Most of Dassin's films in the decades following the blacklist are European productions.[1] His prolific later career in Europe and the affiliation with Greece through his second wife, combined with a common pronunciation of his surname as "Da-SAN" in Europe, as opposed to "DASS-in" in the US leads to a common misconception that he is a Greek, or possibly French, director who made a few films in the US early in his career.
[edit] Personal life
Jules Dassin was married to:
* Béatrice Launer, a Hungarian-born violinist (aka Beatrice Launer-Dassin). They married in 1933 and divorced in 1962. Their children were: Joseph Ira Dassin (1938–1980), a popular French singer in the 1970s, songwriter Richelle "Rickie" Dassin (born 1940), and actress-singer Julie Dassin (born 1944 and also known as Julie D.).[1]
* Melina Mercouri, Greek actress and former wife of Panos Harokopos. They married in 1966.
[edit] Affiliation with Greece
He was considered a major Philhellene to the point of Greek officials describing him as a "first generation Greek". Along with his last wife, Melina Mercouri, he opposed the Greek military junta. A major supporter of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens, for which he established the Melina Mercouri Institution in her memory, he missed the opening ceremony of the New Acropolis Museum by only a few months due to his death at the age of 96.[2]
Upon his death, the Greek prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, released a statement: "Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and true friend. His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."[1]
[edit] Awards and honors
For his 1956 film Rififi, Dassin earned the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.[1] His 1960 film Never on Sunday earned the music Academy Award (Manos Hadjidakis, Ta Paidia tou Peiraia), and the Cannes Film Festival best actress award (Melina Mercouri).[2][3]
[edit] Filmography
Year Film Credited as
Director Producer Writer Actor Role
1941 The Tell-Tale Heart Yes
1942 Nazi Agent Yes
The Affairs of Martha Yes
Reunion in France Yes
1943 Young Ideas Yes
1944 The Canterville Ghost Yes
1946 Two Smart People Yes
A Letter for Evie Yes
1947 Brute Force Yes
1948 The Naked City Yes
1949 Thieves' Highway Yes
1950 Night and the City Yes
1955 Rififi Yes Yes Yes Cesar le Milanais
1957 He Who Must Die Yes Yes
1959 The Law Yes Yes
1960 Never on Sunday Yes Yes Yes Yes Homer Thrace
1962 Phaedra Yes Yes Yes Yes Christo
1964 Topkapi Yes Yes Yes Turkish cop
1966 10:30 P.M. Summer Yes Yes Yes
1968 Survival 1967 Yes Yes
Up Tight! Yes Yes Yes
1970 Promise at Dawn Yes Yes Yes Yes Ivan Mozzhukhin
1974 The Rehearsal Yes Yes Yes
1978 A Dream of Passion Yes Yes Yes
1980 Circle of Two Yes
[edit] References
1. ^ a b c d e Luther, Claudia (April 1, 2008). "Blacklisted Director Jules Dassin Dies at 96". The Times. http://www.zap2it.com/celebrities/news/zap-julesdassinobit,0,5046745.story.
2. ^ a b (Greek) Skai News, Απεβίωσε ο Ζυλ Ντασέν (Jules Dassin died), English (machine translation) Retrieved on 2008-04-01.
3. ^ Internet Movie Database, Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), Retrieved on 2008-04-01.
Michael Curtiz
Michael Curtiz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For others of a similar name, see Michael Curtis (disambiguation).
Michael Curtiz
Michael Curtiz
Born Manó Kertész Kaminer
December 24, 1886(1886-12-24)
Budapest, Hungary
(Austria-Hungary)
Died April 10, 1962 (aged 75)
Hollywood, California,
United States
Spouse(s) Lucy Doraine (1918-1923)
Lili Damita (1925-1926)
Bess Meredyth (1929-1962)
Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 - April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian-American filmmaker (with early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertész). He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States. The best-known were The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
o 1.1 Early life
o 1.2 Career in the US
* 2 Working with colleagues
* 3 Criticism
* 4 Awards
* 5 Selected Hollywood filmography
* 6 References
o 6.1 Notes
o 6.2 Bibliography
* 7 External links
[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
Curtiz was born Manó Kertész Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.[1]
Details of his early experience as a director are sparse, and it is not clear what part he may have played in the direction of several early films, but he is known to have directed at least one film in Hungary before spending six months in 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. While in Denmark, Curtiz worked as the assistant director for August Blom on Denmark's first multi-reel feature film, Atlantis. On the outbreak of World War I, he briefly served in the artillery of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but he had returned to film-making by 1915. In that or the following year he married for the first time, to actress Lucy Doraine. The couple divorced in 1923.
Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalised in 1919, during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic, and soon settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for Sascha Films, among them the Biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924). The latter, released in the US as Moon of Israel, caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz for his own studio with the intention of having him direct a similar film for Warner Brothers -- Noah's Ark, which was eventually produced in 1928. Curtiz's second marriage, to another actress, Lili Damita, lasted from 1925 to 1926.[citation needed] When he went to America, Curtiz left behind at least one illegitimate son and one illegitimate daughter.[2]
[edit] Career in the US
Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926 (according to some sources on the fourth of July, but according to others in June).[3] He took the anglicised name "Michael Curtiz". He had a lengthy and prolific Hollywood career, with directing credits on over 100 films in many film genres. During the 30s, Curtiz was often credited on four films in a single year, although he was not always the sole director on these projects. In the pre-Code period, Curtiz directed such films as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Doctor X (both shot in two-strip Technicolor), and The Kennel Murder Case.
In the mid-30s, he began the highly successful cycle of adventure films starring Errol Flynn that included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk and Santa Fe Trail (1940).
By the early 1940s Curtiz had become fairly wealthy, earning $3,600 per week and owning a substantial estate, complete with polo pitch.[4] One of his regular polo partners was Hal B. Wallis, who had met Curtiz on his arrival in the country and had established a close friendship with him. Wallis' wife, the actress Louise Fazenda, and Curtiz's third wife, Bess Meredyth, an actress and screenwriter, had been close since before Curtiz's marriage to Meredyth in 1929. Curtiz was frequently unfaithful, and had numerous sexual relationships with extras on set; Meredyth once left him for a short time, but they remained married until 1961, shortly before Curtiz's death.[5] She was Curtiz's helper whenever his need to deal with scripts or other elements went beyond his grasp of English, and he often phoned her for advice when presented with a problem while filming.[6]
Prime examples of his work in the 1940s are The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). During this period he also directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943), which was commissioned at the request of president Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to aid the wartime effort. Other Curtiz efforts included Four Daughters 1938, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Life With Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn and The Breaking Point (1950).
While Curtiz himself had escaped Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not as lucky. His sister's family were sent to Auschwitz, where her husband died. Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund, a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the US.[7]
In the late 1940s, he made a new agreement with Warners under which the studio and his own production company were to share the costs and profits of his subsequent films. These films did poorly, however, whether as part of the changes in the film industry in this period or because Curtiz "had no skills in shaping the entirety of a picture".[8] Either way, as Curtiz himself said, "You are only appreciated so far as you carry the dough into the box office. They throw you into gutter next day".[9] The long partnership between director and studio descended into a bitter court battle.
After his relationship with Warners broke down, Curtiz continued to direct on a freelance basis from 1954 onwards. The Egyptian (1954) for Fox starring Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney. He directed many films for Paramount, including White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye; We're No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart; and King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. His final film, The Comancheros, was released less than a year before his death from cancer on April 10, 1962. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
[edit] Working with colleagues
Curtiz was always extremely active: he worked very long days, took part in several sports in his spare time, and was often found to sleep under a cold shower.[10] He was dismissive of actors who ate lunch, believing that "lunch bums" had no energy for work in the afternoons. The flip side of his dedication was an often callous demeanour: Fay Wray, who worked under him on Mystery of the Wax Museum, said that, "I felt that he was not flesh and bones, that he was part of the steel of the camera".[11] Curtiz was not popular with most of his colleagues, many of whom thought him arrogant.[12] He reserved most of his venom for subordinates rather than his stars, frequently quarreling with his technicians and dismissing one extra by saying, "More to your right. More. More. Now you are out of the scene. Go home".[13] Bette Davis refused to work with him again after he called her a "goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch"; he had a low opinion of actors in general, saying that acting "is fifty percent a big bag of tricks. The other fifty percent should be talent and ability, although it seldom is". Nevertheless, he did not offend everyone: he treated Ingrid Bergman with courtesy on the set of Casablanca, while Claude Rains credited him with teaching him the difference between film and theater acting, or, "what not to do in front of a camera".[14]
Curtiz had a lifelong struggle with the English language and there are many anecdotes about his failures. He bewildered a set dresser on Casablanca by demanding a "poodle", when he actually wanted a puddle of water. David Niven liked Curtiz's phrase "bring on the empty horses" (for "bring on the horses without riders") so much that he used it for the title of the second volume of his memoirs.
[edit] Criticism
Aljean Harmetz states that, "Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices".[15]
Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz did have his own distinctive style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows".[16] This style was not purely visual, but had the effect of highlighting the character's relationship to his environment; often this environment was identified with the fate in which the character was trapped.[17] This entrapment then forces the "morally divided" protagonist to make a moral choice. While Rosenzweig accepts that almost every film involves such moral dilemmas to some extent, it is Curtiz's directorial decisions which place the element center stage in his films, albeit at an emotional rather than an intellectual level.[18]
[edit] Awards
Curtiz received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director: before Casablanca won in 1943, he was nominated for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, and for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1938. Captain Blood came second as a write-in nomination in 1936.
[edit] Selected Hollywood filmography
Main article: Michael Curtiz filmography
* The Charlatan (1917)
* The Mad Genius (1931) with John Barrymore and Marian Marsh
* The Cabin in the Cotton (1932) with Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis
* Doctor X (1932) with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill
* Goodbye Again (1933) with Warren William and Joan Blondell
* Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) with Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell
* The Kennel Murder Case (1933) with William Powell as Philo Vance
* Jimmy the Gent (1934) with James Cagney and Bette Davis
* Front Page Woman (1935) with Bette Davis and George Brent
* Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland
* The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone
* Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart
* Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
* The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
* Santa Fe Trail (1940) with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan
* Virginia City (1940) with Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart
* The Sea Hawk (1940) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
* The Sea Wolf (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield
* Casablanca (1942) with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
* Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) with James Cagney and Walter Huston
* Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth
* Night and Day (1946) with Cary Grant as Cole Porter
* The Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal
* I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), a biopic of composer and lyricist Gus Kahn, with Doris Day and Danny Thomas
* White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney
* The Egyptian (1954) with Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney
* We're No Angels (1955) with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov
* King Creole (1958) with Elvis Presley and Walter Matthau
* The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960) with Eddie Hodges, Tony Randall and Patty McCormick
* The Comancheros (1961) with John Wayne and Stuart Whitman
[edit] References
[edit] Notes
1. ^ Rosenzweig p. 5.
2. ^ Harmetz p. 122.
3. ^ Rosenzweig p. 6 states July 4; Harmetz p. 63 states June.
4. ^ Harmetz p. 76.
5. ^ Harmetz p. 121.
6. ^ Harmetz p. 123.
7. ^ Harmetz p. 221.
8. ^ Harmetz pp. 191, 332.
9. ^ Harmetz p. 332.
10. ^ Harmetz p. 188.
11. ^ Harmetz p. 126.
12. ^ Rosenzweig p. 7.
13. ^ Harmetz p. 124.
14. ^ Harmetz p. 190.
15. ^ Harmetz pp 183-4, 184.
16. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 6-7.
17. ^ Rosenzweig p. 158.
18. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 158-159.
[edit] Bibliography
* Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca". Orion Publishing Co, 1993.
* Rosenzweig, Sidney. Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For others of a similar name, see Michael Curtis (disambiguation).
Michael Curtiz
Michael Curtiz
Born Manó Kertész Kaminer
December 24, 1886(1886-12-24)
Budapest, Hungary
(Austria-Hungary)
Died April 10, 1962 (aged 75)
Hollywood, California,
United States
Spouse(s) Lucy Doraine (1918-1923)
Lili Damita (1925-1926)
Bess Meredyth (1929-1962)
Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 - April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian-American filmmaker (with early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertész). He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States. The best-known were The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Life
o 1.1 Early life
o 1.2 Career in the US
* 2 Working with colleagues
* 3 Criticism
* 4 Awards
* 5 Selected Hollywood filmography
* 6 References
o 6.1 Notes
o 6.2 Bibliography
* 7 External links
[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
Curtiz was born Manó Kertész Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.[1]
Details of his early experience as a director are sparse, and it is not clear what part he may have played in the direction of several early films, but he is known to have directed at least one film in Hungary before spending six months in 1913 at the Nordisk studio in Denmark honing his craft. While in Denmark, Curtiz worked as the assistant director for August Blom on Denmark's first multi-reel feature film, Atlantis. On the outbreak of World War I, he briefly served in the artillery of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but he had returned to film-making by 1915. In that or the following year he married for the first time, to actress Lucy Doraine. The couple divorced in 1923.
Curtiz left Hungary when the film industry was nationalised in 1919, during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic, and soon settled in Vienna. He made at least 21 films for Sascha Films, among them the Biblical epics Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924). The latter, released in the US as Moon of Israel, caught the attention of Jack Warner, who hired Curtiz for his own studio with the intention of having him direct a similar film for Warner Brothers -- Noah's Ark, which was eventually produced in 1928. Curtiz's second marriage, to another actress, Lili Damita, lasted from 1925 to 1926.[citation needed] When he went to America, Curtiz left behind at least one illegitimate son and one illegitimate daughter.[2]
[edit] Career in the US
Curtiz arrived in the United States in 1926 (according to some sources on the fourth of July, but according to others in June).[3] He took the anglicised name "Michael Curtiz". He had a lengthy and prolific Hollywood career, with directing credits on over 100 films in many film genres. During the 30s, Curtiz was often credited on four films in a single year, although he was not always the sole director on these projects. In the pre-Code period, Curtiz directed such films as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Doctor X (both shot in two-strip Technicolor), and The Kennel Murder Case.
In the mid-30s, he began the highly successful cycle of adventure films starring Errol Flynn that included Captain Blood (1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dodge City, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Sea Hawk and Santa Fe Trail (1940).
By the early 1940s Curtiz had become fairly wealthy, earning $3,600 per week and owning a substantial estate, complete with polo pitch.[4] One of his regular polo partners was Hal B. Wallis, who had met Curtiz on his arrival in the country and had established a close friendship with him. Wallis' wife, the actress Louise Fazenda, and Curtiz's third wife, Bess Meredyth, an actress and screenwriter, had been close since before Curtiz's marriage to Meredyth in 1929. Curtiz was frequently unfaithful, and had numerous sexual relationships with extras on set; Meredyth once left him for a short time, but they remained married until 1961, shortly before Curtiz's death.[5] She was Curtiz's helper whenever his need to deal with scripts or other elements went beyond his grasp of English, and he often phoned her for advice when presented with a problem while filming.[6]
Prime examples of his work in the 1940s are The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). During this period he also directed the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow (1943), which was commissioned at the request of president Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to aid the wartime effort. Other Curtiz efforts included Four Daughters 1938, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Life With Father (1947), Young Man with a Horn and The Breaking Point (1950).
While Curtiz himself had escaped Europe before the rise of Nazism, other members of his family were not as lucky. His sister's family were sent to Auschwitz, where her husband died. Curtiz paid part of his own salary into the European Film Fund, a benevolent association which helped European refugees in the film business establish themselves in the US.[7]
In the late 1940s, he made a new agreement with Warners under which the studio and his own production company were to share the costs and profits of his subsequent films. These films did poorly, however, whether as part of the changes in the film industry in this period or because Curtiz "had no skills in shaping the entirety of a picture".[8] Either way, as Curtiz himself said, "You are only appreciated so far as you carry the dough into the box office. They throw you into gutter next day".[9] The long partnership between director and studio descended into a bitter court battle.
After his relationship with Warners broke down, Curtiz continued to direct on a freelance basis from 1954 onwards. The Egyptian (1954) for Fox starring Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney. He directed many films for Paramount, including White Christmas (1954), starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye; We're No Angels (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart; and King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. His final film, The Comancheros, was released less than a year before his death from cancer on April 10, 1962. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
[edit] Working with colleagues
Curtiz was always extremely active: he worked very long days, took part in several sports in his spare time, and was often found to sleep under a cold shower.[10] He was dismissive of actors who ate lunch, believing that "lunch bums" had no energy for work in the afternoons. The flip side of his dedication was an often callous demeanour: Fay Wray, who worked under him on Mystery of the Wax Museum, said that, "I felt that he was not flesh and bones, that he was part of the steel of the camera".[11] Curtiz was not popular with most of his colleagues, many of whom thought him arrogant.[12] He reserved most of his venom for subordinates rather than his stars, frequently quarreling with his technicians and dismissing one extra by saying, "More to your right. More. More. Now you are out of the scene. Go home".[13] Bette Davis refused to work with him again after he called her a "goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch"; he had a low opinion of actors in general, saying that acting "is fifty percent a big bag of tricks. The other fifty percent should be talent and ability, although it seldom is". Nevertheless, he did not offend everyone: he treated Ingrid Bergman with courtesy on the set of Casablanca, while Claude Rains credited him with teaching him the difference between film and theater acting, or, "what not to do in front of a camera".[14]
Curtiz had a lifelong struggle with the English language and there are many anecdotes about his failures. He bewildered a set dresser on Casablanca by demanding a "poodle", when he actually wanted a puddle of water. David Niven liked Curtiz's phrase "bring on the empty horses" (for "bring on the horses without riders") so much that he used it for the title of the second volume of his memoirs.
[edit] Criticism
Aljean Harmetz states that, "Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices".[15]
Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz did have his own distinctive style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows".[16] This style was not purely visual, but had the effect of highlighting the character's relationship to his environment; often this environment was identified with the fate in which the character was trapped.[17] This entrapment then forces the "morally divided" protagonist to make a moral choice. While Rosenzweig accepts that almost every film involves such moral dilemmas to some extent, it is Curtiz's directorial decisions which place the element center stage in his films, albeit at an emotional rather than an intellectual level.[18]
[edit] Awards
Curtiz received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director: before Casablanca won in 1943, he was nominated for Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, and for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1938. Captain Blood came second as a write-in nomination in 1936.
[edit] Selected Hollywood filmography
Main article: Michael Curtiz filmography
* The Charlatan (1917)
* The Mad Genius (1931) with John Barrymore and Marian Marsh
* The Cabin in the Cotton (1932) with Richard Barthelmess and Bette Davis
* Doctor X (1932) with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill
* Goodbye Again (1933) with Warren William and Joan Blondell
* Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) with Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell
* The Kennel Murder Case (1933) with William Powell as Philo Vance
* Jimmy the Gent (1934) with James Cagney and Bette Davis
* Front Page Woman (1935) with Bette Davis and George Brent
* Captain Blood (1935) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland
* The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone
* Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart
* Dodge City (1939) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
* The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
* Santa Fe Trail (1940) with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan
* Virginia City (1940) with Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart
* The Sea Hawk (1940) with Errol Flynn and Alan Hale, Sr.
* The Sea Wolf (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield
* Casablanca (1942) with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
* Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) with James Cagney and Walter Huston
* Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth
* Night and Day (1946) with Cary Grant as Cole Porter
* The Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal
* I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), a biopic of composer and lyricist Gus Kahn, with Doris Day and Danny Thomas
* White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney
* The Egyptian (1954) with Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney
* We're No Angels (1955) with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov
* King Creole (1958) with Elvis Presley and Walter Matthau
* The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960) with Eddie Hodges, Tony Randall and Patty McCormick
* The Comancheros (1961) with John Wayne and Stuart Whitman
[edit] References
[edit] Notes
1. ^ Rosenzweig p. 5.
2. ^ Harmetz p. 122.
3. ^ Rosenzweig p. 6 states July 4; Harmetz p. 63 states June.
4. ^ Harmetz p. 76.
5. ^ Harmetz p. 121.
6. ^ Harmetz p. 123.
7. ^ Harmetz p. 221.
8. ^ Harmetz pp. 191, 332.
9. ^ Harmetz p. 332.
10. ^ Harmetz p. 188.
11. ^ Harmetz p. 126.
12. ^ Rosenzweig p. 7.
13. ^ Harmetz p. 124.
14. ^ Harmetz p. 190.
15. ^ Harmetz pp 183-4, 184.
16. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 6-7.
17. ^ Rosenzweig p. 158.
18. ^ Rosenzweig pp. 158-159.
[edit] Bibliography
* Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca". Orion Publishing Co, 1993.
* Rosenzweig, Sidney. Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)