World War II Generation Directors

Rivaling Sam Newfield and William Beaudine as one of the American film industry's most prolific directors, Lew Landers began directing features in the mid-'30s under his real name of Louis Friedlander, but changed it to Lew Landers after several films. His first effort, The Raven (1935), with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, was probably his best. Landers worked for just about every studio in Hollywood during his long career, but spent a lot of time at RKO and Columbia turning out low-budget adventure epics, thrillers and westerns. In the 1950s he turned to series television, as many of his fellow B directors did, and alternated between that and features for the remainder of his career.

Mikhail Romm was born in 1901, into a Russian-Jewish family, in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Russia. He served in the Red Army in 1918-21 as an Inspector of the Special Forces for Food Supplies. He was in charge of confiscations of bread and food from the wealthier farmers (kulaks) in Central Russia. Romm later was avoiding any discussions regarding this painful memories, though he used his experience in the films about Lenin.

He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Arts and Technology as a sculptor (1925), where he studied under Anna Golubkina. Worked as a sculptor and interpreter. In 1928-30 he worked at Institute for extra-scholastic studies as researcher on the theory of Cinematography. From 1931 he worked at Mosfilm Studios, where he made his first film 'Pyshka' (1934). His next film '13' (1936) was considered the first Soviet "eastern" (a Soviet answer to "western"). During the years of "Great Terror" under Joseph Stalin Romm made two features and a documentary about Lenin.

His criminal drama 'Murder on the Dante Street' (1956) was the first film for the great Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy. After an eight-year brake Romm made his 'Nine Days in One Year' (1962). It was an excellent psychological drama about the life and death of nuclear physicists. After the political shifts during and after the "Thaw", started by Nikita Khrushchev, Romm devoted his talent to documentary material. He worked like a sculptor, cutting through the massive Nazi archives of documentaries in Germany. His work was rewarded with an astounding result - 'Tiumph over violence' (1965) in which he also was a narrator. His last film 'I vse-taki Ya Veryu' (1974) was finished by his disciples Marlen Khutsiev and Elem Klimov.

Ken G. Hall was born on 22 February 1901 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He was a director and producer, known for The Exploits of the Emden (1928), The Farmer Goes to Town (1938) and Vengeance of the Deep (1938). He was married to Irene Addison. He died on 8 February 1994 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Ub Iwerks worked as a commercial artist in Kansas City in 1919 when he met Walt Disney who was in the same profession. When Disney decided to form an animation company, Ub Iwerks was the first employee he had due to his skill at fast drawing as well as being a personal friend.

When Charles Mintz raided Disney's animation studio and stole the rights to their character Oswald the Rabbit, Ub was the only associate to remain with Disney. He served as the principal animator for the first Mickey Mouse shorts and Silly Symphonies. Iwerks was so prominent in the production of these shorts that it was speculated that Ub was the dominant force behind the success of Disney Productions. The combination of Iwerks' rising ambitions, occasional differences with Walt and a tempting deal with Pat Powers to finance his own studio prompted him to break away in 1930. His studio was never a tenth of the artistic or financial success that Disney was. He simply did not have the creative talents of his partner and his characters, Flip the Frog and Willy Whopper were rather dull failures. His studio was closed in 1936 when Powers withdrew his support. He worked for Columbia starting in 1938 and worked for two years until he decided to return to Disney. The two men never commented on their renewed relationship but the reunion was mutually beneficial. Iwerks was able to abandon animation and concentrate on technical development which helped create many of the special effects that the Disney company excelled in for decades, especially concerning the live action animation combination sequences in Song of the South (1946) and Mary Poppins (1964).

Clyde Geronimi was born on 12 June 1901 in Chiavenna, Lombardy, Italy. He was a director, known for Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). He died on 24 April 1989 in Newport Beach, California, USA.

Paul Verhoeven was born on 23 June 1901 in Unna, Germany. He was an actor and director, known for Vergiß die Liebe nicht (1953), Der große Schatten (1942) and Du bist nicht allein (1949). He was married to Doris Kiesow. He died on 22 March 1975 in Munich, Bavaria, West Germany.

Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.

Len Lye was born on 5 July 1901 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was a director and writer, known for Crusade in Europe (1949), N or NW (1938) and He Loved an Actress (1938). He was married to Annette Zeiss and Jane Florence Winifred Thompson. He died on 15 May 1980 in Warwick, Rhode Island, USA.

Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.

Famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg was born Israel Strassberg in Budzanov, Austria-Hungary (now Budanov, Ukraine). Brought to America as a child, he had a brief acting career, before becoming one of the founders of the Group Theatre in 1931, directing a number of plays there. His greatest influence, however, was through the Actors Studio, where he became director in 1950. A proponent of "method" acting, which he adapted from the "system" brought to America by Konstantin Stanislavski's disciple--and Marlon Brando's mentor--Stella Adler, he influenced several generations of actors, from James Dean to Dustin Hoffman. Film audiences would know him best as gangster Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II (1974).

Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Flora Disney (née Call) and Elias Disney, a Canadian-born farmer and businessperson. He had Irish, German, and English ancestry. Walt moved with his parents to Kansas City at age seven, where he spent the majority of his childhood. At age 16, during World War I, he faked his age to join the American Red Cross. He soon returned home, where he won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute. There, he met a fellow animator, Ub Iwerks. The two soon set up their own company. In the early 1920s, they made a series of animated shorts for the Newman theater chain, entitled "Newman's Laugh-O-Grams". Their company soon went bankrupt, however.

The two then went to Hollywood in 1923. They started work on a new series, about a live-action little girl who journeys to a world of animated characters. Entitled the "Alice Comedies", they were distributed by M.J. Winkler (Margaret). Walt was backed up financially only by Winkler and his older brother Roy O. Disney, who remained his business partner for the rest of his life. Hundreds of "Alice Comedies" were produced between 1923 and 1927, before they lost popularity.

Walt then started work on a series around a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This series was successful, but in 1928, Walt discovered that M.J. Winkler and her husband, Charles Mintz, had stolen the rights to the character away from him. They had also stolen all his animators, except for Ub Iwerks. While taking the train home, Walt started doodling on a piece of paper. The result of these doodles was a mouse named Mickey. With only Walt and Ub to animate, and Walt's wife Lillian Disney (Lilly) and Roy's wife Edna Disney to ink in the animation cells, three Mickey Mouse cartoons were quickly produced. The first two didn't sell, so Walt added synchronized sound to the last one, Steamboat Willie (1928), and it was immediately picked up. With Walt as the voice of Mickey, it premiered to great success. Many more cartoons followed. Walt was now in the big time, but he didn't stop creating new ideas.

In 1929, he created the 'Silly Symphonies', a cartoon series that didn't have a continuous character. They were another success. One of them, Flowers and Trees (1932), was the first cartoon to be produced in color and the first cartoon to win an Oscar; another, Three Little Pigs (1933), was so popular it was often billed above the feature films it accompanied. The Silly Symphonies stopped coming out in 1939, but Mickey and friends, (including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and plenty more), were still going strong and still very popular.

In 1934, Walt started work on another new idea: a cartoon that ran the length of a feature film. Everyone in Hollywood was calling it "Disney's Folly", but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was anything but, winning critical raves, the adoration of the public, and one big and seven little special Oscars for Walt. Now Walt listed animated features among his ever-growing list of accomplishments. While continuing to produce cartoon shorts, he also started producing more of the animated features. Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) were all successes; not even a flop like Fantasia (1940) and a studio animators' strike in 1941 could stop Disney now.

In the mid 1940s, he began producing "packaged features", essentially a group of shorts put together to run feature length, but by 1950 he was back with animated features that stuck to one story, with Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953). In 1950, he also started producing live-action films, with Treasure Island (1950). These began taking on greater importance throughout the 50s and 60s, but Walt continued to produce animated features, including Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).

In 1955 he opened a theme park in southern California: Disneyland. It was a place where children and their parents could take rides, just explore, and meet the familiar animated characters, all in a clean, safe environment. It was another great success. Walt also became one of the first producers of films to venture into television, with his series The Magical World of Disney (1954) which he began in 1954 to promote his theme park. He also produced The Mickey Mouse Club (1955) and Zorro (1957). To top it all off, Walt came out with the lavish musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), which mixed live-action with animation. It is considered by many to be his magnum opus. Even after that, Walt continued to forge onward, with plans to build a new theme park and an experimental prototype city in Florida.

He did not live to see the culmination of those plans, however; in 1966, he developed lung cancer brought on by his lifelong chain-smoking. He died of a heart attack following cancer surgery on December 15, 1966 at age 65. But not even his death, it seemed, could stop him. Roy carried on plans to build the Florida theme park, and it premiered in 1971 under the name Walt Disney World. His company continues to flourish, still producing animated and live-action films and overseeing the still-growing empire started by one man: Walt Disney, who will never be forgotten.

Kajirô Yamamoto was born on 15 March 1902 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malay (1942), Tôkyô no kyûjitsu (1958) and Hana no naka no musume-tachi (1953). He died on 28 September 1974 in Japan.

Gustav Fröhlich was born on 21 March 1902 in Hanover, Germany. He was an actor and director, known for Metropolis (1927), Leb' wohl, Christina (1945) and Seine Tochter ist der Peter (1955). He was married to Maria Hajek and Gitta Alpar. He died on 22 December 1987 in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland.

Director Max Ophüls was born Max Oppenheimer in Saarbrücken, Germany. He began his career as a stage actor and director in the golden twenties. He worked in cities such as Stuttgart, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Vienna, Frankfurt, Breslau and Berlin. In 1929 his son Marcel Ophüls was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He had begun to work under his pseudonym Max Ophüls by that time. In the early 1930s Ophüls discovered the movie world and began to work as an assistant director for Anatole Litvak. He directed his first movies (I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil (1931), The Company's in Love (1932)) in that time too. Around 1933 he emigrated to France and also worked in the Netherlands and Italy for a period of eight years. In 1941 he emigrated again, this time to the USA where he worked for a period of 10 years before he went back to France in 1950. Beginning in 1954 he also worked in Germany again, mainly for German radio in Baden-Baden. Max Ophüls died in March 1957 in Hamburg, Germany and is buried on the famous cemetery Père-Lachaise in Paris, France.

Charles T. Barton was born in Oakland, CA, on May 25, 1902. His father managed a candy store, and soon moved the family to Los Angeles, where Charles, nicknamed "Charlie", got a job at age 15 acting as an extra in silent movies. He eventually left acting for a job behind the camera as an assistant director, a position for which he won an Academy Award in 1934. That same year he made his first feature as a director, Wagon Wheels (1934), for Paramount. He stayed at Paramount for several years, turning out four to five pictures a year, but a stint as an assistant to autocratic director Cecil B. DeMille on Union Pacific (1939) resulted in his leaving Paramount for Columbia Pictures. He worked steadily at that studio, directing seven to eight pictures a year, mostly "B" musicals and westerns. In 1945 he left Columbia for Universal Pictures, where he gained a reputation as a first-rate comedy director, especially for Universal's top comedy team, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. He directed what many regard as their best picture, the critically and financially successful Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) (on the other hand, he also directed what many consider their worst picture, Dance with Me, Henry (1956)). Unlike many of the team's directors, Barton actually got along quite well with them, especially Costello, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. The team specifically requested him for "A&C Meet Frankenstein", as their last few pictures had failed and Universal was thinking about dumping them. The film was a huge success and revitalized their career.

As the 1950s progressed Barton began to do less feature work and more television work (he was one of the first feature-film directors to work regularly both in television and films when in 1951 he took over as the house director on The Amos 'n Andy Show (1951)), often for Walt Disney. In the 1960s he became one of the regular directors on the hit comedy series Family Affair (1966) and also directed episodes of several other successful series, such as McHale's Navy (1962), Dennis the Menace (1959) and Hazel (1961).

Charles Barton passed away in Burbank, CA, on December 5, 1981.

William Wyler was an American filmmaker who, at the time of his death in 1981, was considered by his peers as second only to John Ford as a master craftsman of cinema. The winner of three Best Director Academy Awards, second again only to Ford's four, Wyler's reputation has unfairly suffered as the lack of an obvious "signature" in his diverse body of work denies him the honorific "auteur" that has become a standard measure of greatness in the post-"Cahiers du Cinéma" critical community.

His directorial career spanned 45 years, from silent pictures to the cultural revolution of the 1970s. Nominated a record 12 times for the Academy Award for Best Director, he won three and in 1966, was honored with the Irving Thalberg Award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' ultimate accolade for a producer. So high was his reputation in his lifetime that he was the fourth recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, after Ford, James Cagney and Welles. Along with Ford and Welles, Wyler ranks with the best and most influential American directors, including Griffith, DeMille, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.

Born Willi Wyler on July 1, 1902, in Mulhouse, Alsace (then a possession of Germany), to Jewish parents. His Swiss-born father, Leopold, started as a traveling salesman but later became a thriving haberdasher in Mulhouse. His mother, Melanie (née Auerbach; died February 13, 1955, Los Angeles, aged 77), was German-born, and a cousin of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures. Melanie Wyler often took him and his older brother Robert to concerts, opera, and the theatre, as well as the early cinema. Sometimes at home his family and their friends would stage amateur theatricals for personal enjoyment.

He used his family connections to establish himself in the film industry. Upon being offered a job by his mother's first cousin, Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle, Wyler emigrated to the US in 1920 at the age of 18. After starting in Universal's New York offices as an errand boy, he moved his way up through the organization, ending up in the California operation in 1922. Wyler was given the opportunity to direct in July 1925, with the two-reel western The Crook Buster (1925). It was on this film that he was first credited as William Wyler, though he never officially changed his name and would be known as "Willi" all his life. For almost five years he performed his apprenticeship in Universal's "B" unit, turning out a score of low-budget silent westerns. In 1929 he made his first "A" picture, Hell's Heroes (1929), Universal's first all-sound movie shot outside a studio. The western, the first version of the "Three Godfathers" story, was a commercial and critical success.

The initial years of the Great Depression brought hard times for the film industry, and Universal went into receivership in 1932, partially due to financial troubles brought about by rampant nepotism and the runaway production costs rung up by producer Carl Laemmle Jr., the son of the boss. There were 70 Laemmle family members on the Universal payroll at one point, including Wyler. In 1935 "Uncle" Carl was forced to sell the studio he had created in 1912 with the 1912 merger of his Independent Motion Picture Co. with several other production companies. Wyler continued to direct for Universal up until the end of the family regime, helming Counsellor at Law (1933), the film version of Elmer Rice's play featuring one of John Barrymore's more restrained performances, and The Good Fairy (1935), a comedy adapted from a Ferenc Molnár play by Preston Sturges and starring Margaret Sullavan, who was Wyler's wife for a short time. Both films were produced by his cousin, "Junior" Laemmle. Emancipated from the Laemmle family, Wyler subsequently established himself as a major director in the mid-1930s, when he began directing films for independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. During this key period, he alternated between adaptations of famous plays and filming versions of classic novels. Willi would soon find his freedom fettered by the man with the fabled "Goldwyn touch," which entailed bullying his directors to recast, rewrite and re-cut their films, and sometimes even replacing them during shooting.

The first of the Wyler-Goldwyn collaborations was These Three (1936), based on Lillian Hellman's lesbian-themed play "The Children's Hour" (the Sapphic theme was jettisoned and sanitized into a conventional heterosexual love triangle due to censorship concerns, but it resurfaced intact when Wyler remade the film a quarter-century later). His first unqualified success for Goldwyn was Dodsworth (1936), an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' portrait of a disintegrating American marriage, a marvelous film that still resonates with audiences in the 21st century. He received his first Best Director Oscar nomination for this picture. The film was nominated for Best Picture, the first of seven straight years in which a Wyler-directed movie would earn that accolade, culminating with Oscars for both William Wyler and Mrs. Miniver (1942) in 1942.

Wyler's potential greatness can be seen as early as "Hell's Heroes," an early talkie that is not constrained by the restrictions of the new technology. The climax of the picture, with Charles Bickford's dying badman walking into town, is a long tracking shot that focuses not on the actor himself but the detritus that he shucks off to lighten his load as he brings a baby back to a cradle of civilization. The scene is a harbinger of the free-flowing style that would become a hallmark of his work. However, it was with "Dodsworth" that Wyler began to establish his critical reputation. The film features long takes and a probing camera, a style that Wyler would make his own. Now established as Goldwyn's director of choice, Wyler made several films for him, including Dead End (1937) and Wuthering Heights (1939). Essentially an employee of the producer, Wyler clashed with Goldwyn over aesthetic choices and longed for his freedom. Goldwyn had demanded that the ghetto set of "Dead End" be spruced up and that "clean garbage" be used in the water tank representing the East River, over Wyler's objections. Goldwyn prevailed, as he did later with the ending of "Wuthering Heights." After he had finished principal photography on the film, Goldwyn demanded a new ending featuring the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy reunited and walking away towards what the audience would assume is heaven and an eternity of conjoined bliss. Wyler opposed the new ending and refused to shoot it. Goldwyn had his ending shot without Wyler and had it tacked onto the final cut. It was an artistic betrayal that rankled Wyler.

Goldwyn loaned out Wyler to other studios, and he made Jezebel (1938) and The Letter (1940) for Warner Bros. Working with Bette Davis in the two masterpieces, as well as in Goldwyn's The Little Foxes (1941), Wyler elicited three of the great diva's finest performances. In these films and his films of the mid-to-late 1930s, Wyler pioneered the use of deep-focus cinematography, most famously with lighting cameraman Gregg Toland. Toland shot seven of the eight films Wyler directed for Goldwyn: "These Three", Come and Get It (1936), "Dead End," "Wuthering Heights" (for which Toland won his only Academy Award), The Westerner (1940), "The Little Foxes" and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Compositions in Wyler pictures frequently featured multiple horizontal planes with various characters arranged in diagonals at varying distances from the camera lens. Creating an illusion of depth, these deep-focus shots enhanced the naturalism of the picture while heightening the drama. As the photography of Wyler's films was used to serve the story and create mood rather than call attention to itself, Toland was later mistakenly given credit for creating deep-focus cinematography along with another great director, Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane (1941). His first use of deep-focus cinematography was in 1935, with "The Good Fairy", on which Norbert Brodine was the lighting cameraman. It was the first of his films featuring deep-focus shots and the diagonal compositions that became a Wyler leitmotif. The film also includes a receding mirror shot a half-decade before Toland and Welles created a similar one for "Citizen Kane."

Wyler won his first Oscar as Best Director with "Mrs. Miniver" for MGM, which also won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first of three Wyler films that would be so honored. Made as a propaganda piece for American audiences to prepare them for the sacrifices necessitated by World War II, the movie is set in wartime England and elucidates the hardships suffered by an ordinary, middle-class English family coping with the war. An enthusiastic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after seeing the film at a White House screening, said, "This has to be shown right away." The film also won Oscars for star Greer Garson and co-star Theresa Wright, for cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and for Best Screenplay.

After "Miniver," Wyler went off to war as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces. One of his more memorable propaganda films of the period was a documentary about a B-17 bomber, The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), He also directed the Navy documentary The Fighting Lady (1944), an examination of life aboard an American aircraft carrier. Though the later film won an Oscar as Best Documentary, "The Memphis Belle" is considered a classic of its form. The making of the documentary was even the subject of a 1990 feature film of the same name. "The Memphis Belle" focuses on the eponymous B-17 bomber and its 25th, and last, air raid flown from a base in England. The documentary features aerial battle footage that Wyler and his crew shot over the skies of Germany. One of his photographic crew, flying in another plane, was killed during the filming of the air battles. Wyler himself lost the hearing in one ear and became partially deaf in the other due to the noise and concussion of the flak bursting around his aircraft.

Wyler's first picture upon returning from World War II would prove to be the last movie he made for Goldwyn. A returning veteran like those portrayed in "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), this film won Wyler his second Oscar. The movie, which featured a moving performance by real-life veteran and double amputee Harold Russell, struck a universal chord with Americans and was a major box office hit. It was the second Wyler-directed picture to be named Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The film also won Oscars for star Fredric March and co-star Russell (who was also given an honorary award "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans"), film editor Daniel Mandell, composer Hugo Friedhofer and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, and was instrumental in garnering the Irving Thalberg Award for Samuel Goldwyn, who also took home the Best Picture Oscar that year as "Best Years" producer.

Though Wyler elicited some of the finest performances preserved on film, ironically he could not communicate what he wanted to an actor. A perfectionist, he became known as "40-Take Wyler", shooting a scene over and over again until the actors played it the way he wanted. With his use of long takes, actors were forced to act within each take as their performances would not be covered in the cutting room. His long takes and lack of cutting slowed down the pacing of his films, providing a greater feeling of continuity within each scene and intimately involving the audience in the development of the drama. The story in a Wyler film was allowed to unfold organically, with no tricky editing to cover up holes in the script or to compensate for an inadequate performance. Wyler typically rehearsed his actors for two weeks before the beginning of principal photography.

While more actors won Academy Awards in Wyler movies, 14 out of a total of 36 nominations (more than any other two directors combined), few actors worked more than once or twice with him. Bette Davis worked on three films with him and won Academy Award nominations for each performance and an Oscar for "Jezebel." On their last collaboration, "The Little Foxes" (1941), Davis walked off the production for two weeks after clashing with Wyler over how her character should be played.

He proved hard on other experienced actors, such as Laurence Olivier in "Wuthering Heights," who gave credit to Willi for turning him from a stage actor into a movie actor. "This isn't the Opera House in Manchester," Wyler told Olivier, his way of conveying that he should tone down his performance. A year earlier, Wyler had forced Henry Fonda through 40 takes on the set of "Jezebel," Wyler's only direction being "Again" after each repeated take. When Fonda demanded some input on what he was doing wrong, Wyler replied only: "It stinks. Do it again." According to Charlton Heston, Wyler approached him early in the shooting of Ben-Hur (1959) and told him that his performance was inadequate. When a dismayed Heston asked him what he should do, "Be better" is all that Wyler could supply. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan, a famed "actor's director", tells how he offered advice to an actor acquaintance of his who was making a Wyler picture as he knew that the great director was inarticulate about acting and would be unable to give advice.

Wyler believed that after many takes, actors got angry and began to shed their preconceived ideas about acting in general and the part in particular. Stripped of these notions, actors were able to play at a truer level. It is a process that Stanley Kubrick would subsequently use on his post-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) films, though to different results, creating an otherworldly anti-realism rather than the more naturalistic truth of a Wyler movie performance. His methods often meant that his films went over schedule and over budget, but he got results.

Wyler's reputation has suffered as he is not considered an "auteur," or "author" of his films. However, in his postwar career, he definitely was the auteur, or controlling consciousness, behind his films. Although he never took a screenwriting credit (other than for an early horse opera, Ridin' for Love (1926)), he selected his own stories and controlled the screenwriting, hiring his own writers in a development process that could take years. His postwar period films include The Heiress (1949), a fine version of Henry James' novel "Washington Square," with an Oscar-winning performance by Olivia de Havilland; Detective Story (1951), a police drama that takes place on a minimal, controlled set almost as restricted as that of Hitchcock's Rope (1948); and Roman Holiday (1953), which won Audrey Hepburn an Oscar in her first leading role. The other films of this period are Carrie (1952), The Desperate Hours (1955) and Friendly Persuasion (1956).

Wyler returned to the western genre one last time with The Big Country (1958), a picture far removed in scope from his two-reeler origins, featuring Gregory Peck, Heston, and Wyler's old "Hell's Heroes" star Bickford. Burl Ives won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the patriarch of an outlaw clan in conflict with Bickford's family. Wyler was next enlisted by producer Sam Zimbalist to helm MGM's high-stakes "Ben-Hur" (1959), a remake of its 1925 classic. It was a high-budget ($15 million, approximately $90 million when factored for inflation), wide-screen (the aspect ratio of the film is 2.76 to 1 when properly shown in 70mm anamorphic prints, the highest ratio ever used for a film) epic that the studio had spent six years preparing. Principal photography required more than six months of shooting on location in Italy, with hundreds of crew members and thousands of extras. Wyler was the overlord of the largest crew and oversaw more extras than any other film had ever used. Wyler's "Ben-Hur" grossed $74 million (approximately $600 million at today's ticket prices, ranking it #13 film in terms of all-time box office performance, when adjusted for inflation), the film was the fourth highest-grossing film of all-time when it was released, surpassed only by Gone with the Wind (1939), DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), and Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). "Ben-Hur" went on to win 11 Oscars out of 12 nominations, including a third Best Director Academy Award for Wyler. The 11 Oscars set a record since tied by Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

In the last decade of his career, he remade "These Three" as The Children's Hour (1961), a franker version of Hellman's play than his 1936 version. The Collector (1965) was his last artistic triumph, and he had his last hit with Funny Girl (1968), for which Barbra Streisand repeated Audrey Hepburn's success of 15 years earlier, wining an Oscar in her first lead role. Wyler's last film was The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), an estimable failure that tackled the theme of racial prejudice, but which came out in the revolutionary time of Easy Rider (1969) and other such films and held little promise for such traditional warhorses as Wyler.

Although he reportedly dreamed of making more pictures, Wyler's failing health kept him from taking on another film. Instead, he and his wife Margaret Tallichet, the mother of his five children, contented themselves with travel. William Wyler died on July 27, 1981, in Beverly Hills, California.

Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.

Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years.

Norman Ferguson was born on 2 September 1902 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and production manager, known for Dumbo (1941), Pinocchio (1940) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). He was married to Gladys F.. He died on 4 November 1957 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Academy Award-winning actor John Houseman's main contribution to American culture was not his own performances on film but rather, his role as a midwife to one of the greatest actor-directors-cinematic geniuses his adopted country ever produced (Orson Welles) and as a midwife to a whole generation of actors as head of the drama division of the Juilliard School.

Houseman was born Jacques Haussmann on September 22, 1902 in Bucharest, Romania, to May (Davies) and Georges Haussmann, who ran a grain business. His father was from an Alsatian Jewish family, and his mother, who was British, was of Welsh and Irish descent. John was raised in England, where he was educated. He emigrated to America in 1925, establishing himself in New York City, where he directed "Four Saints in Three Acts" for the theater in 1934. He founded the Mercury Theatre along with Orson Welles (whom he affectionately called "The Dog-Faced Boy"). Their most important success was a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", in which the spectre of Hitler and Mussolini's Fascist states were evoked.

As a producer assigned to Unit 891 of the Federal Theater Project funded by the government's Works Progress Administration, he produced the legendary production "Cradle Will Rock", a musical about the tyranny of capitalism, with music by Marc Blitzstein, creative input from Welles, and starring leftists Howard Da Silva and Will Geer. The production was so controversial, it was banned before its debut, although the did manage to stage one performance. On Broadway, apart from the Mercury Theatre and the WPA, Houseman directed "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1939) and "Liberty Jones" and produced "Native Son" (1941). During World War II, Houseman went to work for the Office of War Information and was involved in broadcasting radio propaganda for the Voice of America. After the war, Houseman returned to directing and produced Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's version of Julius Caesar (1953).

He had produced his first film, Orson Welles' Too Much Johnson (1938), while with the Mercury Theatre. He was involved with the pre-production of Citizen Kane (1941) but fell out with Welles due to Welles' already legendary ego. He produced a score of major films and was involved in three television series before devoting his life to teaching. He helped establish the acting program at New York's famous Julliard School for the Arts, where he influenced a new generation of actors. Ironically, he had appeared in only one major movie, in a supporting role, before being tapped to replace James Mason in The Paper Chase (1973). He won an Academy Award for the role and began a 15-year career as a highly sought after supporting player.

John Houseman, who wrote three volumes of memoirs, "Run-Through" (1972), "Front and Center" (1979) and "Final Dress" (1983), died at age 86 on October 31, 1988 after making major contributions to the theater and film.

Educated at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart, Emeric Pressburger worked as a journalist in Hungary and Germany and an author and scriptwriter in Berlin and Paris. He was a Hungarian Jew, chased around Europe (he worked on films for UFA in Berlin and Paris) before World War II, finally finding sanctuary in London--but as a scriptwriter who didn't speak English. So he taught himself to understand not only the finer nuances of the language but also of the British people. A few lucky breaks and introductions via old friends led to his meeting with "renegade" director Michael Powell. They then went on to make some of the most interesting (IMHO) and complex films of the 1940s and 1950s under the banner of "The Archers". Pressburger often showed a deep understanding of the British only granted to those "outside, looking in". He always prided himself on being "more English than the English". After all, some of us were just BORN English, but he CHOSE to become English. He spent his last days at Shoemakers Cottage, Aspall, Stowmarket, Suffolk in the English countryside that he loved so well.

Robert Webb comes from a long list of Hollywood notables. His brother, Millard Webb was a silent movie director who was married to dancer Mary Eaton. Robert's sister, Bethel Webb Hoffman was a silent movie actress; while her son and Robert's nephew, Bud Hoffman was a Film Editor at Universal Studios.

Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in Chicago on February 28 1903, his father Vincent was a musical conductor of the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater. Wanting to pursue an artistic career, Minelli worked in the costume department of the Chicago Theater, then on Broadway during the depression as a set designer and costumer, adopting a Latinized version of his father's first name when he was hired as an art-director by Radio City Music Hall. The fall of 1935 saw his directorial debut for a Franz Schubert revue, At Home Abroad. The show was the first of three, in the best Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. spirit, before receiving Arthur Freed's offer to work at MGM. This was his second try at Hollywood -- a short unsuccessful contract at Paramount led nowhere. He stayed at MGM for the next 26 years. After working on numerous Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicles, usually directed by Busby Berkeley, Arthur Freed gave him his first directorial assignment on Cabin in the Sky (1943), a risky screen project with an all-black cast. This was followed by the ambitious period piece Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) whose star Judy Garland he married in 1945. Employing first-class MGM technicians, Minnelli went on directing musicals -- The Band Wagon (1953) - as well as melodramas -- Some Came Running (1958) - and urban comedies like Designing Woman (1957), occasionally even working on two films simultaneously. Minnelli is one of the few directors for whom Technicolor seems to have been invented. Many of his films included in every one of his movies features a dream sequence.

Hiroshi Shimizu was born on 28 March 1903 in Shizuoka, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for Ornamental Hairpin (1941), Children in the Wind (1937) and Sono ato no hachi no su no kodomotachi (1951). He was married to Kinuyo Tanaka. He died on 23 June 1966 in Kyoto, Japan.

Russian-born French art director and director who gained a significant reputation, particularly as a collaborator with director Jean Renoir. At the age of sixteen, Lourié went to Paris where he studied painting and stage design. He designed sets and costumes for various ballet companies before turning his attention to film. After working as co-art director on a few films, including two for Renoir, Lourié took over as sole art director for Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937). Lourié worked steadily with Renoir, and went to America with him in 1941. He also was art director for Charles Chaplin's last American film, Limelight (1952). He branched into directing, specializing in, of all things, giant-monster films, often art directing and doing special effects on them as well. He continued as a respected art director into the 1980's. Following a series of strokes, Lourié died of heart failure at the reported age of 89, although most reference works list a birth year of 1905, which would have made him approximately 86. He was survived by his wife Laure and a daughter.

Luis Moglia Barth was born on 12 April 1903 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was a director and writer, known for ¡Tango! (1933), Dancing (1933) and The Last Meeting (1938). He died on 18 June 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.