Oscar-Winning Aquarius — Best Director
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Milos Forman was born Jan Tomas Forman in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, to Anna (Svabova), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. During World War II, his parents were taken away by the Nazis, after being accused of participating in the underground resistance. His father died in Mittelbau-Dora, a sub camp of Buchenwald, and his mother died in Auschwitz, at which Milos became an orphan very early on. He studied screen-writing at the Prague Film Academy (F.A.M.U.). In his Czechoslovakian films, Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), and The Firemen's Ball (1967), he created his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968, to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States. In spite of difficulties, he filmed Taking Off (1971) there and achieved his fame later with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) adapted from the novel of Ken Kesey, which won five Oscars, including one for best direction. Other important films of Milos Forman were the musical Hair (1979) and his biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus (1984), which won eight Oscars.- Director
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John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, counting (he always did) the two that he won for his WWII documentary work. He had one wife; a son and daughter; and a grandson, Dan Ford who wrote a biography on his famous grandfather.- Director
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Michael Cimino studied architecture and dramatic arts; later he filmed advertisements and documentaries and also wrote scripts until the actor, producer and director Clint Eastwood gave him the opportunity to direct the thriller Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). But his biggest success was The Deer Hunter (1978) which won the Oscar for Best Picture. For another successful film, The Sicilian (1987), he got into trouble with critics when they accused him of portraying as a hero the Italian criminal Salvatore Giuliano.- Actor
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger, who was born in London, on February 16, 1926, was the eldest child in a solidly middle-class Jewish family. Berbard Schlesinger, his father, was a pediatrician, and his mother, Winifred, was a musician. He served in the Army in the Far East during World War II. While attending Balliol College at Oxford, Schlesinger was involved with the Undergraduate Dramatic Society and developed an interest in photography. While at Oxford, he made his first short film, "Black Legend," in 1948. He took his degree in 1950 after reading English literature and then went into television. From 1958 through 1961, he made documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corp.
His 1960 documentary, Terminus (1961), which was sponsored by British-Transport, won him a British Academy Award and the Gold Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He made the transition to feature films in 1962, with the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving (1962), which got him noticed on both sides of the Atlantic. His next film, the Northern comedy Billy Liar (1963), was a success and began his association with actress Julie Christie, who had a memorable turn in the film. Christie won the Best Actress Academy Award and international superstardom and Schlesinger his first Oscar nomination as Best Director with his next film, the watershed Darling (1965), which dissected Swinging London. Subsequently, Schlesinger and Christie collaborated on Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic novel, in 1967. The movie was not a success with critics or at the box office at the time, though its stature has grown over time. His next film, Midnight Cowboy (1969), earned him a place in cinema history, as it was not only a huge box office hit but also widely acclaimed as a contemporary classic. It won the Oscar for Best Picture and garnered Schlesinger an Oscar for Best Director.
Schlesinger earned his third, and last, Oscar nomination for the highly acclaimed Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). He continued to operate at a high state of aesthetic and critical achievement with The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976) and Yanks (1979), but his 1981 comedy, Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), was one of the notable flops of its time, bringing in only $2 million on a $24-million budget when breakeven was calculated as three times negative cost. Although Schlesinger continued to work steadily as a director in movies and TV, he never again tasted the sweet fruits of success that he had for more than a decade, beginning in the mid-'60s.
Schlesinger's artistic fulfillment increasingly came from directing for the stage and, specifically, opera. He directed William Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens" for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1964, and after his movie career faded, he directed plays, musicals, and opera productions. After Laurence Olivier was eased out of the National Theatre in 1973, Schlesinger was named an associate director of the NT under Olivier's successor, Sir Peter Hall of the RSC.
Schlesinger suffered a stroke in December 2000. His life partner, Michael Childers, took him off life support, and he died the following day, July 24, 2003, in Palm Springs, Claifornia. He was 77 years old.- Writer
- Producer
- Director
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 11, 1909, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz first worked for the movies as a translator of intertitles, employed by Paramount in Berlin, the UFA's American distributor at the time (1928). He became a dialoguist, then a screenwriter on numerous Paramount productions in Hollywood, most of them Jack Oakie vehicles. Still in his 20s, he produced first-class MGM films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940). Having left Metro after a dispute with studio chief Louis B. Mayer over Judy Garland, he then worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, producing The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), when Ernst Lubitsch's illness first brought him to the director's chair for Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz directed 20 films in a 26-year period, successfully attempted every kind of movie from Shakespeare adaptation to western, from urban sociological drama to musical, from epic film with thousands of extras to a two-character picture. A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950) brought him wide recognition along with two Academy Awards for each as a writer and a director, seven years after his elder brother Herman J. Mankiewicz won Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). His more intimate films like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Barefoot Contessa (1954)--his only original screenplay--and The Honey Pot (1967) are major artistic achievements as well, showing Mankiewicz as a witty dialoguist, a master in the use of flashback and a talented actors' director (he favored English actors and had in Rex Harrison a kind of alter-ego on the screen).- Director
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- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Delbert Mann, the Oscar-winning film director, was born Delbert Martin Mann Jr. in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1920. His father moved the family to Nashville, Tennesse, after taking a teaching position at Scarritt College. The young Mann graduated from Vanderbilt University, where he met his future wife, Ann Caroline Gillespie. He developed a lifelong friendship with Fred Coe, whom he met at the Nashville Community Playhouse, that would prove critical in his professional life.
After his 1941 graduation from Vanderbilt, Mann joined the Army and was assigned to the Air Corps, eventually becoming a pilot with the 8th Air Force. As a B-24 pilot with the "Mighty Eighth," Mann flew 35 bombing missions in the European Theater of Operations. After being demobilized at the end of the war, his interest changed to another type of theater, and he attended the Yale Drama School. From Yale he moved on to a directing job with the Town Theatre of Columbia, South Carolina.
His old friend Fred Coe, a producer at NBC, offered Mann the opportunity to direct live television drama on the network's The Philco Television Playhouse (1948). Mann accepted the job offer and moved to New York in 1949. For NBC he directed many dramas for the "Philco Playhouse," which later alternated its broadcasting weeks on the network with the Goodyear Playhouse (1951) and Producers' Showcase (1954) (television programs in the early days typically had one major commercial sponsor; thus, many programs from the early days bore the name of that primary sponsor). Mann directed episodes for all three showcases, including "October Story" with Julie Harris and Leslie Nielsen, "Middle of the Night" with Eva Marie Saint and E.G. Marshall, a remake of The Petrified Forest (1936) with the inevitable Humphrey Bogart (who created the role of Duke Mantee on the Broadway stage and played it in the classic 1935 film), and even two productions of William Shakespeare's "Othello" (one of which featured the unlikely Walter Matthau as Iago!).
Mann was one of the best-known graduates of "The Golden Age of Television," when live original drama was a staple of network TV. Other showcases he worked for included NBC Repertory Theatre (1949), Ford Star Jubilee (1955) and Playwrights '56 (1955). In 1953 he directed a live teleplay written by another WWII vet, Paddy Chayefsky. The episode of "Goodyear Television Playhouse" starring another vet, the up-and-coming Method actor Rod Steiger, as a lonely butcher named "Marty."
Delbert Mann's name will always be linked to the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that was "Marty," but it was as a film, not as television program, that Chayevsky's 1953 script became legendary, the first blockbuster hit of independent cinema. However, Mann's first recognition from the culture industry didn't come from Chayevsky's "Marty," either on television or film, but from Thornton Wilder's theatrical warhorse about a small burg in New Hampshire, "Our Town."
In 1954, Mann won a Best Director Emmy nomination for the "Producers' Showcase" episode "Our Town," a musical adaptation featuring the young Paul Newman and the singing talents of swinging Frank Sinatra. Ironically, the TV play of "Marty," considered the summit of TV's Golden Age in retrospect, went unrecognized during the nascent industry's awards season, though it did receive an excellent buzz via word of mouth. (The live "Marty" was captured via kinescope, a method of reproduction that involved shooting a 16-mm copy of the broadcast off of a TV monitor for rebroadcast to the West Coast in the days before coast-to-coast TV hookups, let along videotape; such programs were seldom rebroadcast after the initial showing due to the poor quality of the 'scope.) That situation would change once "Marty" moved from New York to Hollywood.
It's said that superstar Burt Lancaster and his producing partner Ben Hecht were looking for a property to generate a tax write-off for their successful indie production company, Hecht-Lancaster. That property was Marty, shot in B+W in the standard Academy ratio of 4:3 in an era when the blockbuster, like Cecil B. DeMIlle's epic remake of "The Ten Commandments," shot in color in the wide-screen processes of CinemaScope, Cinerama and VistaVision, were all the rage. (The box office gross of the 1956 "Ten Commandments," if adjusted for inflation, would rival the grosses generated by the top block busters of the present era.) Color, widescreens and spectacle were considered to be the necessary ingredients to get people out of the house where they were planted in front of the TV and back into the theaters. And here was a low-budget, B+W film with no production values and no stars based on a TV play that had appeared free on TV (Hollywood's great enemy) just two years before!
Remaking "Marty" seemed an honorable way to generate a tax-write off, so the story goes, while associating the company with quality, but Hecht-Lancaster refused to spend much money on it. The budget was limited to just under $350,000. (It's said that "Marty" was the first Oscar-winning film in which the advertising costs exceeded the budget.) Rod Steiger, who did not want to be bound contractually to Hecht-Lancaster, refused to reprise the eponymous title role, so it was turned over to Burt Lancaster's "From Here to Eternity" co-star, 'Ernest Borginine' . Having assayed Fatso Judson and other screen heavies in his brief cinema career, Borgnine had never played a sympathetic supporting character, let alone a lead, on film before.
Possibly due to its unpromising prospects, Burt Lancaster didn't bother putting his name on the picture as a producer, leaving that honor (and the Oscar that lay in "Marty's future) to Hecht. No wonder the success of "Marty" caught everyone flat-footed! It's perhaps the supreme case in Hollywood's checkered flirtation with "quality" cinema that quality not only won out, but more importantly, paid off (and paid off handsomely at that!).
The movie "Marty" was a critical success before it was a commercial success. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955, it was the first American film to win the Golden Palm (an award which, in the French manner, is shared by its director). In release, the film returned $3 million in rentals ($21 million in 2005 dollars), which was a considerable amount in the mid-1950s. More importantly for Hecht-Lancaster, its low-budget made "Marty" one of the most profitable movies ever made.
The critical recognition and boffo box office made "Marty" a sleeper at the 1956 Academy Awards, at which Mann won the Oscar as Best Director of 1955 and Chayevsky copped the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy. In addition to the original "auteurs," Ernest Borgnine won the Best Actor Oscar and Harold Hecht picked up the gong for Best Picture. Betsy Blair and Joe Mantell also received nominations in Best Supporting Acting categories, and on the technical side, "Marty" was nominated for Best B+W Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle) and Best B+W Art Direction-Set Decoration ( Ted Haworth, Walter M. Simonds, Robert Priestley). Until Sam Mendes duplicated the feat in 2000, Mann was the only director to win an Oscar for his first film.
Though he could not know it then, "Marty" was the highpoint of Mann's career. While Chayevsky went on to win two more Oscars, Mann never won another Oscar nomination, though he did pick up two more Emmy nominations in 1972 and 1980 during his productive career. More significantly, Delbert Mann had the respect of his peers: in addition to his three subsequent Directors Guild of America nominations to go along with his win for "Marty," the DGA honored him with its Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award in 1997 and an Honorary Life Membership in 2002.- Director
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Frank Lloyd was an unpretentious, technically skilled director, who crafted several enduring Hollywood classics during the 1930's. He started out as a stage actor and singer in early 1900's London and was well-known as an imitator of Harry Lauder. After several years in music hall and with touring repertory companies, Lloyd emigrated to Canada in 1909 and joined the travelling theatrical troupe of Winnipeg entrepreneur C.P. Walker. In between acting, he made ends meet by working as a repair man on telegraph lines. While in Edmonton, Alberta, he met and married the German-American soubrette Alma Haller. Lloyd spent several months on the vaudeville circuit and in burlesque shows on the West Coast before marking his arrival in Hollywood with an acting contract at Universal in 1913. After two years of consistently poor critical notices, he gave up the acting profession for good and turned his skills to writing and directing.
In two years at Fox, 1917-19, he directed some fifteen films, often starring the popular matinée idol William Farnum. The majority were Zane Grey westerns (including an early version of Riders of the Purple Sage (1918)) and adaptations of classic literature (such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and Les Misérables (1917)). After a spell with Samuel Goldwyn, Lloyd joined First National/Warner Brothers (1922-31) and became the resident specialist in period drama and swashbuckling adventure. As his reputation grew, he was given charge of his own production unit. Among his most famous films during this period are Oliver Twist (1922), with Jackie Coogan in the title role and Lon Chaney as Fagin; The Eternal Flame (1922), a historical drama based on a novel by Honoré de Balzac; and The Sea Hawk (1924), with Milton Sills. In 1929, Lloyd became the second director to receive a coveted Academy Award, for The Divine Lady (1928), one of three films for which he had been nominated.
Much of Lloyd's acclaim is based on his work during the 1930's. At Fox (1931-34), he directed Noël Coward's Cavalcade (1933), and the historical fantasy Berkeley Square (1933) -- both with meticulous attention to geographic and period detail. Immensely popular at the box office, the former won Lloyd his second Oscar and returned $ 5 million in grosses from a production cost of $1.25 million. 'Berkeley Square' was described by the New York Times as "an example of delicacy and restraint" and "in a class by itself" (September 14, 1933). Lloyd's brief stint at MGM in 1935 culminated in the greatest success of his career. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) won the Best Picture Oscar in its year and heaped praise on the director for maintaining strong narrative cohesion throughout, and for eliciting superb performances from stars Clark Gable (as Fletcher Christian) and Charles Laughton (as Captain Bligh). Lloyd continued in the same vein with the rollicking Foreign Legion adventure Under Two Flags (1936) and the sweeping (though historically inaccurate), big budget western epic Wells Fargo (1937). Also at Paramount, and, once again with his own production unit , he filmed the romantic story of adventurer-poet François Villon, If I Were King (1938), with excellent production values and superb acting from Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone.
After completing a two-year contract at Columbia (1940-41), Lloyd served in World War II in command of the 13th Air Force Combat Camera Unit, turning out short documentaries. He rose to the rank of major and was decorated with the Legion of Merit. After the war, he temporarily retired to life on his Carmel Valley ranch, but made a brief comeback after the death of his wife Alma. His swan song for Republic Studio was the story of the Battle of the Alamo, The Last Command (1955), a suitably-titled finale to the career of one of the great action directors of the period. Lloyd has a star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.