Coordinates	37°46′45.48″N122°25′9.12″N
{{infobox film| name	Paths of Glory
director	Stanley Kubrick
producer	James B. Harris
writer	Screenplay:Stanley KubrickJim ThompsonCalder Willingham
based on
starring	Kirk DouglasRalph MeekerAdolphe MenjouGeorge Macready
music	Gerald Fried
cinematography	Georg Krause
editing	Eva Kroll
studio	Bryna Productions
distributor	United Artists
released	December 25, 1957
runtime	86 minutes
country
language	English
budget	$935,000 }}

''Paths of Glory'' is a 1957 American anti-war film by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refused to continue a suicidal attack. Dax attempts to defend them against a charge of cowardice in a court martial.

Background

Cobb's novel had no title when it was finished, so the publisher held a contest. The winning entry came from the ninth stanza of the famous Thomas Gray poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th'inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

The book was a minor success when published in 1935, retelling the true-life affair of four French soldiers who were executed to set an example to the rest of the troops. The novel was adapted to stage the same year by Sidney Howard, where it played on Broadway as ''Paths of Glory''. The play was a flop because of its harsh anti-war scenes that alienated the audience, Howard was a WWI veteran and wanted to show the horrors of war. Nonetheless, convinced that the novel should be made into a film, Howard wrote, “It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture.” Fulfilling Howard's "sacred obligation", Stanley Kubrick decided to adapt it to the screen after he remembered reading the book when he was younger. Kubrick and his partners purchased the film rights from Cobb's widow for $10,000.

''Paths of Glory'' is based loosely on the true story of four French soldiers during World War I, under General Géraud Réveilhac, executed for mutiny in Souain, France; their families sued, and while the executions were ruled unfair, two of the families received one franc each, while the others received nothing. The novel is about the French execution of innocent men to strengthen others' resolve to fight. The French Army did carry out military executions for cowardice, as did all the other major participants. However, a significant point in the film is the practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them as a punishment for the sins of the whole group. This is similar to the Roman practice of decimation, which was rarely used by the French Army in World War I.

Plot

The film begins with a voiceover describing the trench warfare situation of World War I up to 1916; immediately following this is a scene in which General George Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) of the French General Staff asks his subordinate, General Mireau (George Macready), to send his division on a suicidal mission to take a well-defended German position called the "Anthill". Mireau initially refuses the commission, citing the impossibility of success and the danger to his beloved soldiers, but when Broulard mentions a potential promotion, Mireau quickly convinces himself the attack will succeed.

Mireau proceeds to walk through the trenches, addressing his men. He asks several soldiers, "Ready to kill more Germans?" He throws one soldier out of the regiment for showing signs of shell shock, which Mireau denies exists, blaming the soldier's behavior on cowardice. Mireau leaves the detailed planning of the attack to the 701's Régiment Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), despite Dax's protests that the only result of the attack will be to weaken the French army with heavy losses for no benefit. Mireau does not relent.

During a scouting mission prior to the attack, a drunken lieutenant named Roget (Wayne Morris) sends one of his two men ahead as a scout. Overcome by fear while waiting for the scout's return, he lobs a grenade and retreats. The other soldier—Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker)—finds the body of the scout, killed by the grenade. Having safely returned, he confronts Roget, but Roget denies any wrongdoing, and falsifies his report.

The attack on the German position proceeds, beginning with a first wave of soldiers, and with Dax leading, but ends in disaster; none of the men reach the German trenches, and one-third of the soldiers (B Company) refuse to leave the trench because of heavy enemy fire. Mireau, enraged, orders his own artillery to open fire on them to force them onto the battlefield. The artillery commander refuses to fire on his own men without written confirmation of the orders. Meanwhile, Dax returns to the trenches, and tries to rally B Company to join the battle, but as he climbs out of the trench, the body of a retreating French soldier knocks him down; it becomes obvious that the attack has failed.

To deflect blame for the failure, Mireau decides to court martial 100 of the soldiers for cowardice. Broulard convinces him to reduce the number to three, one from each company. Corporal Paris is chosen because his commanding officer, Lt. Roget, wishes to keep him from testifying about his actions in the scouting mission. Private Ferol (Timothy Carey) is picked by his commanding officer because he is a "social undesirable". The last man, Private Arnaud (Joe Turkel), is chosen randomly by lot, despite having been cited for bravery twice previously.

Dax, who was a criminal defense lawyer in civilian life, defends the men at their court-martial. Unfortunately, the trial is a farce and the rights of the accused are repeatedly violated e.g. there is no specific and formal statement of the charges against them at the commencement of the trial, no verbatim stenographic record of the trial proceedings is being created, and compelling evidence which would support acquittal of the defendants is not permitted to be heard. In his closing statement, Dax challenges the court's authenticity, and requests mercy, saying, "Gentlemen of the court, to find these men guilty would be a crime to haunt each of you till the day you die." The three men are sentenced to death, nonetheless.

Later, Dax, aware of the reason Roget picked Paris to be executed, appoints Roget to have charge of the executions. Horrified, Roget protests, but Dax dismisses him curtly from his quarters.

Captain Rousseau (John Stein), the artillery commander who had earlier refused Mireau's order to fire on his own men, arrives to tell Dax about the order. Dax then informs Broulard of Mireau's treachery, providing sworn statements by witnesses, but is brusquely dismissed.

The next morning, the three condemned men are led out into a courtyard, among soldiers from all three companies and senior officers. Arnaud, injured during a desperate outburst in prison, is carried out on a stretcher and tied to the execution post. A sobbing Ferol is blindfolded. Paris is offered a blindfold by Roget, but refuses. Roget meekly apologizes to Paris for what he has done, eliciting an ambiguous response. All three men are then shot and killed by the firing squad.

Following the execution, Broulard has breakfast with Mireau. Dax enters, invited by Broulard. Broulard then reveals that Mireau will be investigated for the order to fire on his own men. Mireau denies having made such an order and leaves angrily, declaring that he has been made a scapegoat. Broulard then offers Dax Mireau's command, claiming that Dax had been angling for the promotion all along. Dax responds angrily. Broulard ridicules Dax for being an idealist, saying he pities him as he would the village idiot; Broulard adds that he's done no wrong. Dax replies that he pities the general for his inability to see the wrongs he has done.

After the execution, some of Dax's soldiers are loudly enjoying an entertainer, when the performer brings a young German woman on stage and makes her sing the German folk song "The Faithful Hussar". The hardened troops begin by howling and whistling, but, touched by her song, they end up humming along, some openly weeping. Dax overhears this scene from outside. A sergeant appears with word that the regiment has been ordered to return to the front line trenches immediately, but Dax tells him to give the men a few minutes more. His face hardens as he returns to his quarters.

Cast

Kirk Douglas as Col. Dax

Ralph Meeker as Cpl. Philippe Paris

Adolphe Menjou as Maj. Gen. George Broulard

George Macready as Brig. Gen. Paul Mireau

Wayne Morris as Lt. Roget

Richard Anderson as Maj. Saint-Auban

Joe Turkel as Pvt. Pierre Arnaud

Christiane Kubrick as German singer

Jerry Hausner as Proprietor of cafe

Peter Capell as Narrator of opening sequence and Judge of court-martial

Emile Meyer as Father Dupree

Bert Freed as Sgt. Boulanger

Kem Dibbs as Pvt. Lejeune

Timothy Carey as Pvt. Maurice Ferol

Fred Bell as Shell-shock victim

John Stein as Capt. Rousseau (Battery Commander)

Harold Benedict as Capt. Nichols (Artillery spotter)

Production

Development

Although Kubrick's previous film ''The Killing'' had failed at the box office, it had managed to land on several critical Top-Ten lists for the year. Dore Schary, then head of production at MGM, liked the film and hired Kubrick and Harris to develop film stories from MGM's slush pile of scripts and purchased novels. Finding nothing they liked, Kubrick remembered reading Cobb's book years before and suggested it as their next project. Schary strongly doubted the commercial success of the story, which had already been turned down by every other major studio.

After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed to interest Kirk Douglas in a script version that Kubrick had done with Calder Willingham. United Artists agreed to back it with Douglas as the star.

Filming

Production took place entirely in Bavaria, Germany, especially at the Schleissheim Palace near Munich. Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was replaced in the scenes remaining to be shot with a double. The film cost slightly less than $1 million and just about broke even.

An early critical test of Kubrick's obsession with control on the set came during the making of ''Paths of Glory''. As recalled by Kirk Douglas:

The only female character in the film, the woman who sings "The Faithful Hussar", was portrayed by German actress Christiane Harlan (credited in the film as Susanne Christian). She later married director Stanley Kubrick, and the couple remained married until his death in 1999.

Reception

The film was released in January 1958 and premiered in Munich and Los Angeles. The film was considered a modest box office success, though it did earn Kubrick much critical acclaim.

The release of the film and its showing in parts of Europe were controversial. Active and retired military personnel, offended by the way the French military was portrayed in the film, vehemently criticized it after its showing in Brussels (although the film was otherwise well received). Contrary to a persistent urban legend, the film was not banned in France; however, the French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists, the European distributor for the film, through diplomatic channels, to refrain from releasing the film. As a result, the film was not submitted to French censors, and was not shown in France until 1975, when moral codes had changed. In Germany, the film was not allowed to be shown for two years after its release to avoid any strain in relations with France. The film was also officially censored in Spain by the government of Francisco Franco for its anti-military content, and was not released in that country until 1986, 11 years after Franco's death.

The film was nominated for a BAFTA Award under the category Best Film but lost to ''The Bridge on the River Kwai''. The film also won a Jussi Awards' Diploma of merit. In 1959 the film was nominated for a Writers' Guild of America Award but ultimately lost.

On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, producer James B. Harris states that the original script contained an alternate "happy ending". However, in order to preserve the integrity of the film, the ending was changed. Harris got this past distributors by sending the entire script, instead of merely sending the new ending, knowing that they would be too busy to read the entire script again. Once the distributors from United Artists viewed the film, they were very enthusiastic, and left the film as it is.

During the production and release of the movie, Douglas experienced significant negative publicity and financial loss for his role in the making of such a film. Nevertheless, he persisted in his efforts and the film was made and released.

The film holds a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 39 reviews. ''Chicago Sun-Times'' critic Roger Ebert added this film to his "Great Movies" list on February 25, 2005. Gene Siskel, on a section of ''Siskel And Ebert's At The Movies'' show regarding Stanley Kubrick films, declared ''Paths Of Glory'' to be one of the all-time great films and "almost" as good as Kubrick's ''Dr. Strangelove'' (which was his favorite movie).

Legacy

The 1989 BBC comedy series ''Blackadder Goes Forth'' episode "Corporal Punishment" satirizes some of the trial sequences of this film.

The 1991 ''Tales from the Crypt'' episode "Yellow" echoes the movie's themes. The episode stars Kirk Douglas, Eric Douglas, Dan Aykroyd, and Lance Henriksen. Kirk Douglas plays an American Expeditionary Force general whose son (Eric Douglas), is court-martialed for cowardice after a scouting mission in the trenches. Aykroyd plays a Colonel Dax-type role, and Henriksen is the mortally wounded soldier who testifies against the son.

"Paths of Glory" is the name of the tenth track on Faith No More's 1997 ''Album of the Year''. Faith No More's Mike Patton is a fan of Stanley Kubrick and a few of the band's songs and videos include Kubrick-inspired motifs.

''Paths of Glory'' is the name of a card-driven strategy game covering World War I in Europe and the Near East, developed by game designer Ted Raicer and published by GMT Games in 1999.

David Simon, creator of critically acclaimed series ''The Wire'' (2002-2008), has said that ''Paths Of Glory'' was a key influence on the HBO crime drama. The influence of the film comes in its depiction of the tribulations of "middle management," in the form of Dax's unsuccessful attempt to protect his troops against the inhumane ambitions of his superiors, which in turn influenced ''The Wire''s depiction of various institutions acting against individuals.

Preservation and restoration

In 1992, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In October and November 2004 the movie was shown at the London Film Festival by the British Film Institute. It was carefully remastered over a period of several years; the original film elements were found to be damaged. However, with the aid of several modern digital studios in Los Angeles the film was completely restored and remastered for modern cinema. In addition, Stanley Kubrick's widow Christiane (who also appears in the closing scene as the German singer) made a guest appearance at the start of the performance.

See also

'' All Quiet on the Western Front'', a 1929 novel and film with antiwar themes.

''Breaker Morant''

''The Execution of Private Slovik''

French Army Mutinies (1917)

''Hedd Wyn'', a Welsh language biopic with similarly anti-war themes.

Trial film

''A Very Long Engagement''

References

External links

''Paths of Glory'' at gonemovies.com (includes images)

Category:1957 films Category:American films Category:Anti-war films about World War I Category:Black-and-white films Category:English-language films Category:Films based on novels Category:Western Front films (World War I) Category:Films directed by Stanley Kubrick Category:United States National Film Registry films Category:American war drama films Category:Films with a capital punishment theme Category:1950s drama films

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Coordinates	37°46′45.48″N122°25′9.12″N
name	Kirk Douglas
birth name	Issur Danielovitch
birth date	December 09, 1916
birth place	Amsterdam, New York, U.S.
nationality	American
occupation	Actor, producer, director, author
spouse	Diana Dill (1943–51; divorced)Anne Buydens (1954–present)
children	Michael DouglasJoel DouglasPeter DouglasEric Douglas (1958–2004)
relatives	Cameron Douglas (grandson)
years active	1942–present
education	St. Lawrence University
alma mater	American Academy of Dramatic Arts
other names	Izzy Demsky
religion	Conservative Judaism
signature	KirkDouglas.png }}

Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch, ; December 9, 1916) is an American stage and film actor, film producer and author. His popular films include ''Out of the Past'' (1947), ''Champion'' (1949), ''Ace in the Hole'' (1951), ''The Bad and the Beautiful'' (1952), ''Lust for Life'' (1956), ''Paths of Glory'' (1957), ''Gunfight at the O.K. Corral'' (1957), ''Spartacus'' (1960), and ''Lonely Are the Brave'' (1962).

He is No.17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time. In 1996, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community."

Early life

Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the son of Bryna "Bertha" (née Sanglel) and Herschel "Harry" Danielovitch, a businessman. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel, Belarus. His father's brother, who emigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States. In addition to their surname, his parents also changed their given names, to Harry and Bertha. Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky, and legally changed his name to "Kirk Douglas" when entering the Navy during World War II.

Coming from a poor family, as a boy, Douglas sold snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread. Later, he delivered newspapers and worked at more than forty jobs before becoming an actor. He found living in a family of six sisters to be stifling, stating, "I was dying to get out. In a sense, it lit a fire under me." During high school, he acted in school plays, and discovered "The one thing in my life that I always knew, that was always constant, was that I wanted to be an actor."

Unable to afford tuition, Douglas talked his way into St. Lawrence University and received a loan, which he paid back by working part-time as a gardener and a janitor. He was a standout on the wrestling team, and wrestled one summer in a carnival to make money.

Douglas's acting talents were noticed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and he received a special scholarship. One of his classmates was Betty Joan Perske (later to become better known as Lauren Bacall), who would play an important role in launching his film career. Another classmate was aspiring Bermudian actress Diana Dill. While doing summer stock theater during a college term break, he began using the name Kirk Douglas, which he later legally adopted. He earned his first money as an actor that summer. Upon graduating from drama school, Douglas made his Broadway debut as a singing telegraph boy in ''Spring Again''.

Douglas enlisted in the United States Navy in 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War II. He was medically discharged for war injuries in 1944. On May 3, 1943, Diana Dill, his former classmate, appeared on the cover of ''Life'' magazine. Seeing the photograph, Douglas told his fellow sailors that he was going to marry her. He did, on November 2, 1943. The couple had two sons together (Michael in 1944 and Joel in 1947) before they divorced in 1951.

After the war, Douglas returned to New York City and found work in radio, theatre and commercials. His stage break occurred in ''Kiss and Tell'', which led to other roles. Douglas had planned to remain a stage actor but Lauren Bacall helped him get his first screen role in the Hal B. Wallis film ''The Strange Love of Martha Ivers'' (1946), starring Barbara Stanwyck. Wallis was on his way to New York to look for new talent when Bacall suggested he visit Douglas, who was rehearsing a play called ''The Wind Is Ninety''. Douglas finished the play's run and with no follow-up work in sight, headed to Hollywood. He was immediately cast in one of the leading roles in Wallis' film, and made his film acting debut as a weak man dominated by a ruthless woman, unlike his later roles where he often played dominating characters.

Career

Douglas established his image as a tough guy in his eighth film, ''Champion'', playing a selfish boxer. From then on, he made a career of playing "sons of bitches." From that film on, he decided that to succeed as a star, he needed to ramp up his intensity, overcome his natural shyness, and choose stronger roles. He later stated, "I don’t think I’d be much of an actor without vanity. And I’m not interested in being a 'modest actor'." Early in his Hollywood career, he demonstrated his independent streak and broke his studio contracts to gain total control over his projects, forming his own movie company "Bryna Productions", named after his mother.

Douglas made his Broadway debut in 1949 in the Anton Chekhov play "The Three Sisters," produced by Katharine Cornell.

Douglas was a major box office star in the 1950s and 60s, playing opposite some of the leading actresses of that era. Among his various roles, he played a frontier peace officer in his first western ''Along the Great Divide'' (1951). He quickly became comfortable with riding horses and playing gunslingers, and appeared in many westerns. In ''Lonely Are the Brave'' (1962), his own favorite of his performances, Douglas plays a cowboy trying to live by his own code, much as he did in real life.

In ''The Bad and the Beautiful'' (1952), one of his three Oscar-nominated roles, Douglas plays Jonathan Shields, a hard-nosed film producer who manipulates and uses his actors, writers, and directors. In ''Young Man with a Horn'' (1950), Douglas portrays the rise and fall of a driven jazz musician, based on real-life horn player Bix Beiderbecke. Composer-pianist Hoagy Carmichael, playing the sidekick role, added realism to the film and gave Douglas insight into the role, being a friend of the real Beiderbecke. In 2011 he was the presenter at the Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, won by Melissa Leo.

In one of his early television appearances, Douglas was a musical guest (as himself) on ''The Jack Benny Program''. In the opening monologue, Benny reads the reviews of critics who liked his season premiere, while skipping the ones who did not. He then hurries home for his weekly jam session with Tony Martin (on clarinet), Fred MacMurray (saxophone), Dick Powell (trumpet), Dan Dailey (drums), and Douglas (four-string banjo). They avail themselves of the coin-operated vending machines in Benny's living room. The band plays ''Basin Street'' (Blues), but Douglas keeps going into ''Bye Bye Blues'', the only song he knows.

Douglas played many military men, with varying nuance, in ''Top Secret Affair'' (1957), ''Paths of Glory'' (1957) (his most famous role in that genre), ''Town Without Pity'' (1961), ''The Hook'' (1963), ''Seven Days in May'' (1964), ''Heroes of Telemark'' (1965), ''In Harm's Way'' (1965), ''Cast a Giant Shadow'' (1966), ''Is Paris Burning'' (1966), and ''The Final Countdown'' (1980).

His role as Vincent Van Gogh in ''Lust for Life'' (1956), filmed mostly on location in France, was noted not only for the veracity of his appearance but also for how he conveyed the painter’s internal turmoil. He won a Golden Globe award for his role. Director Vincente Minnelli stated, "Kirk Douglas achieved a moving and memorable portrait of the artist—a man of massive creative power, triggered by severe emotional stress, the fear and horror of madness. In my opinion, Kirk should have won the Academy Award." Douglas himself called his acting role as Van Gogh a "very painful experience." He writes, "Not only did I look like Van Gogh, I was the same age he was when he committed suicide."

Douglas played the lead with an all-star cast in ''Spartacus'' (1960). He was the executive producer as well, raising the $12 million production cost. He also played an important role in breaking the Hollywood blacklist by making sure that Dalton Trumbo's name was mentioned in the opening and ending credits of the film for the outstanding screenplay he did for the film. Douglas initially selected Anthony Mann to direct the movie, but dismissed him when he judged the initial shooting to be unsatisfactory. To replace Mann he chose Stanley Kubrick, who three years earlier had collaborated closely with Douglas in ''Paths of Glory'', where Douglas played one of his most notable roles as Colonel Dax, the commander of a French regiment during World War I. ''Spartacus'' was a huge success, but Kubrick, considering himself a mere employee of Douglas and since much of the footage (including Peter Ustinov's key scenes) was shot under Mann, did not consider it to be part of his own oeuvre.

In addition to serious, driven characters, Douglas was adept at roles requiring a comic touch, as in ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'' (1954), an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, wherein he plays a happy-go-lucky sailor who is the opposite in every way of the brooding Captain Nemo (James Mason). The film was one of Walt Disney's most successful live-action movies and a major box-office hit. He manages a similar comic turn in the western ''Man Without a Star'' (1955) and in ''For Love or Money'' (1963).

Douglas made seven films over the decades with Burt Lancaster; ''I Walk Alone'' (1948), ''Gunfight at the O.K. Corral'' (1957), ''The Devil's Disciple'' (1959), ''The List of Adrian Messenger'' (1963), ''Seven Days in May'' (1964), ''Victory at Entebbe'' (1976) and ''Tough Guys'' (1986), which fixed the notion of the pair as something of a team in the public imagination. Douglas was always second-billed under Lancaster in these movies but, with the exception of ''I Walk Alone'', in which Douglas played a villain, and ''The List of Adrian Messenger'', in which Lancaster played a brief part in disguise, their roles were more or less the same size. Both actors arrived in Hollywood at the same time, and first appeared together in the fourth film for each. They both became actor-producers who sought out independent Hollywood careers.

Douglas stated that the keys to acting success are determination and application, "You must know how to function and how to maintain yourself, and you must have a love of what you do. But an actor also needs great good luck. I have had that luck." Douglas had great vitality, "It takes a lot out of you to work in this business. Many people fall by the wayside because they don’t have the energy to sustain their talent." His intensity spilled over into all elements of his film-making. As an actor, he dove into every role, dissecting not only his own lines but all the parts in the script to measure the rightness of the role, and he was willing to fight with the director if he felt justified. According to his wife, he often brought home that intensity, "When he was doing ''Lust for Life'', he came home in that red beard of Van Gogh’s, wearing those big boots, stomping around the house—it was frightening." His distinctive acting style and delivery made him, like James Stewart, a favorite with impersonators, especially Frank Gorshin.

Unlike some actors such as Robert Mitchum, Douglas had a high opinion of actors, movies, and moviemaking, "To me it is the most important art form—it ''is'' an art, and it includes all the elements of the modern age." But he also stressed the entertainment value of films, "You can make a statement, you can say something, but it must be entertaining."

His first film as a director was ''Scalawag'' (1973). In his autobiography ''The Ragman’s Son'', he said "Since I was accused so often of trying to direct the films I was in, I thought I ought to really try my hand at directing." It was a difficult debut with many production problems, requiring his wife to act as producer. Douglas plays a charming scoundrel with one leg, a considerable challenge to his athleticism, and though he got credit for his role, the film received unimpressive reviews. Later in 1973, Douglas appeared in a made-for-TV musical version of ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde''.

Douglas was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in ''Champion'', ''The Bad and the Beautiful'' and ''Lust for Life''. He was especially disappointed for not winning for the latter film, "I really thought I had a chance." Douglas did not win any competitive Oscars, but received a Honorary Academy Award in 1996 for "50 years as a moral and creative force in the motion picture community".

For his contributions to the motion picture industry, Douglas has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6263 Hollywood Blvd. He is one of the few personalities (along with James Stewart, Gregory Peck, and Gene Autry) whose star has been stolen and later replaced. In 1984, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, and he received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1991.

In October 2004, the avenue Kirk Douglas Way in Palm Springs, California was named in his honor by the Palm Springs International Film Society and Film Festival. Popular at home and around the world, Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981, the French Legion of Honor in 1985, and the National Medal of the Arts in 2001.

In March 2009, Douglas starred in an autobiographical one man show titled ''Before I Forget'' at the Center Theater Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California. The four performances were filmed and turned into a documentary that was first screened in January 2010.

On February 27, 2011, Douglas appeared on the stage of the Kodak Theater for the 83rd Academy Awards to present the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Personal life

Douglas married twice, first to Diana Dill, on November 2, 1943. The couple had two sons, actor Michael Douglas and producer Joel Douglas. They divorced in 1951. He then married Anne Buydens on May 29, 1954. They had two sons, producer Peter Douglas and actor Eric Douglas. Eric Douglas died July 6, 2004 of a drug overdose.

In 1991, he survived a helicopter crash in which two people died. This sparked a search for meaning, which led him, after much study, to embrace the Judaism in which he was raised. He documented this spiritual journey in his book ''Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning'' (2001). In his earlier autobiography, ''The Ragman's Son'' (1988), he admits that "years back, I tried to forget that I was a Jew." However, in his later career, he notes that "coming to grips with what it means to be a Jew has been a theme in my life." In an interview in 2000, he explained this transition:

Judaism and I parted ways a long time ago, when I was a poor kid growing up in Amsterdam, N.Y. Back then, I was pretty good in cheder, so the Jews of our community thought they would do a wonderful thing and collect enough money to send me to a yeshiva to become a rabbi. Holy Moses! That scared the hell out of me. I didn't want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be an actor. Believe me, the members of the Sons of Israel were persistent. I had nightmares – wearing long payos and a black hat. I had to work very hard to get out of it. But it took me a long time to learn that you don't have to be a rabbi to be a Jew.

Douglas notes also that the underlying theme of some of his films, including ''The Juggler'' (1953), ''Cast a Giant Shadow'' (1966), and ''Remembrance of Love'' (1982), was about "a Jew who doesn't think of himself as one, and eventually finds his Jewishness." Although his children were only half Jewish, Douglas states that they were "aware culturally" of his "deep convictions," and he never tried to influence their own religious decisions. He notes, however, that Michael answered, "I'm a Jew," when once asked about what he was.

While Douglas has chosen to stay out of political affairs, he has on occasion written letters to politicians who were friends. He notes in his memoir, ''Let's Face It'' (2007), that he felt compelled to write former president Jimmy Carter in 2006 in order to stress that "Israel is the only successful democracy in the Middle East. . . . [and] has had to endure many wars against overwhelming odds. If Israel loses one war, they lose Israel."

In 1996, he suffered a stroke, partially impairing his ability to speak. On December 8, 2006, Douglas appeared on ''Entertainment Tonight'', where the entire staff wished him a happy 90th birthday the night before. His son and daughter-in-law Michael and Catherine Zeta-Jones, were among the many celebrities who attended his birthday celebration. On the show, he discussed the books he has written and the death of his son Eric. Douglas celebrated a second Bar-Mitzvah ceremony in 1999 at the age of eighty-three.

A portrait of Douglas, titled "The Great and the Beautiful," which encapsulated his film career, art collection, philanthropy and rehabilitation from the helicopter crash and the stroke, appeared in ''Palm Springs Life'' magazine in 1999. The article said "For years, this energetic performer could be seen jogging several miles to get his morning paper, playing tennis with locals or posing for snapshots and signing autographs for star-struck out-of-towners. He has been a veritable one-man tourist promotion over the past four decades, extolling the virtue of the city he loves to virtually anyone who'll listen".

Douglas blogs regularly on his Myspace account. At 94, he is the oldest celebrity blogger.

Family tree

Filmography

Films

''The Strange Love of Martha Ivers'' (1946)

''Out of the Past'' (1947)

''Mourning Becomes Electra'' (1947)

''I Walk Alone'' (1948)

''The Walls of Jericho'' (1948)

''My Dear Secretary'' (1949)

''A Letter to Three Wives'' (1949)

''Champion'' (1949)

''Young Man with a Horn'' (1950)

''The Glass Menagerie'' (1950)

''Along the Great Divide'' (1951)

''Ace in the Hole'' (1951)

''Detective Story'' (1951)

''The Big Trees'' (1952)

''The Big Sky'' (1952)

''The Bad and the Beautiful'' (1952)

''The Story of Three Loves'' (1953)

''The Juggler'' (1953)

''Act of Love'' (1953)

''The Jack Benny Program'' (television, 1954)

''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'' (1954)

''The Racers'' (1955)

''Ulisse'' (U.S. title: ''Ulysses'', 1955)

''Man Without a Star'' (1955)

''The Indian Fighter'' (1955)

''Lust for Life'' (1956)

''Top Secret Affair'' (1957)

''Gunfight at the O.K. Corral'' (1957)

''Paths of Glory'' (1957)

''The Vikings'' (1958)

''Last Train from Gun Hill'' (1959)

''The Devil's Disciple'' (1959)

''Strangers When We Meet'' (1960)

''Spartacus'' (1960)

''Town Without Pity'' (1961)

''The Last Sunset'' (1961)

''Lonely Are the Brave'' (1962)

''Two Weeks in Another Town'' (1962)

''The Hook'' (1963)

''The List of Adrian Messenger'' (1963)

''For Love or Money'' (1963)

''Seven Days in May'' (1964)

''In Harm's Way'' (1965)

''The Heroes of Telemark'' (1965)

''Cast a Giant Shadow'' (1966)

''Is Paris Burning?'' (1966)

''The Way West'' (1967)

''The War Wagon'' (1967)

''Once Upon a Wheel'' (documentary, 1968)

''A Lovely Way to Die'' (1968)

''The Brotherhood'' (1968)

''The Arrangement'' (1969)

''There Was a Crooked Man...'' (1970)

''To Catch a Spy'' (1971)

''The Light at the Edge of the World'' (1971)

''A Gunfight'' (1971)

''A Man to Respect'' (1972)

''The Master Touch'' (1972)

''Scalawag'' (1973)

''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'' (1973)

''Posse'' (1975) Also director

''Once Is Not Enough'' (1975)

''Holocaust 2000'' (1977)

''The Fury'' (1978)

''The Villain'' (1979)

''Saturn 3'' (1980)

''Home Movies'' (1980)

''The Final Countdown'' (1980)

''The Man from Snowy River'' (1982)

''Remembrance of Love'' (1982)

''Eddie Macon's Run'' (1983)

''Draw!'' (1984)

''Amos'' (1985)

''Tough Guys'' (1986)

''Queenie'' (television, 1987)

''Inherit the Wind'' (1988)

''Oscar'' (1991)

''Veraz'' (1991)

''The Secret'' (television, 1992)

''A Century of Cinema'' (documentary, 1994)

''Greedy'' (1994)

''Diamonds'' (1999)

''It Runs in the Family'' (2003)

''Illusion'' (2004)

''Meurtres à l'Empire State Building'' (U.S. title: ''Empire State Building Murders'', 2008)

''Before I Forget'' (documentary, 2010)

Short subjects

''Van Gogh: Darkness Into Light'' (1956)

''Rowan & Martin at the Movies'' (1968)

Awards

Academy Awards

1996 Honorary Award for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community

1995 nominated for Honorary Awards

1956 ''Lust for Life'' nominated for Best Actor

1952 ''Bad & the Beautiful'' nominated for Best Actor

1949 ''Champion'' nominated for Best Actor

Berlin International Film Festival

1975 ''Posse'' nominated for Competing Film

New York Film Critics Circle Award

1956 ''Lust for Life'' won for Best Actor

1951 ''Detective Story'' nominated for Best Actor

Bibliography

''Wisdom of the Elders''. 1986.

''The Ragman's Son''. Simon & Shuster, 1988. ISBN 0-671-63717-7.

''Dance With the Devil''. Random House, 1990. ISBN 0-394-58237-3.

The Gift''">The Gift''. Warner Books, 1992. ISBN 0-446-51694-5.

''Last Tango in Brooklyn''. Century, 1994. ISBN 0-7126-4852-6.

''The Broken Mirror: A Novella''. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997. ISBN 0-689-81493-3.

''Young Heroes of the Bible''. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0-689-81491-7.

''Climbing The Mountain: My Search For Meaning''. Simon and Schuster, 2001. ISBN 0-7432-1438-2.

''My Stroke of Luck''. HarperCollins, 2003. ISBN 0-06-001404-0.

''Let's Face It – 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning''. John Wiley & Sons, 2007. ISBN 0-470-08469-3.

See also

References

Further reading

Kress, Michael. ''Rabbis: Observations of 100 Leading and Influential Rabbis of the 21st Century''. (foreword by Kirk Douglas.) Universe, 2002. ISBN 978-0-7893-0804-7.

McBride, Joseph. ''Kirk Douglas''. Pyramid Publications, 1976. ISBN 0-515-04084-3.

Munn, Michael. ''Kirk Douglas''. St. Martin's Press, 1985. ISBN 0-312-45681-6.

Press, Skip. ''Michael and Kirk Douglas''. Silver Burdett Press, 1995. ISBN 0-382-24941-0.

External links

Guest of honor on "Dean Martin Show" Video, 3 min. (circa 1980)

Profile at Turner Classic Movies

An Interview with Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas, le champion de Hollywood

Kirk Douglas interviewed by Mike Wallace on ''The Mike Wallace Interview'' from November 2, 1957

Category:1916 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:Actors from New York Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American Jews Category:American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent Category:American military personnel of World War II Category:American television actors Category:Best Drama Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners Category:Jewish actors Category:American Jews Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Légion d'honneur recipients Category:People from Montgomery County, New York Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:St. Lawrence University alumni Category:Stroke survivors Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:United States Navy sailors

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Coordinates	37°46′45.48″N122°25′9.12″N
Name	Stanley Kubrick
Birth date	July 26, 1928
Birth place	Manhattan, New York City, United States
Notable works	''Dr. Strangelove'', ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', ''The Shining'', ''Full Metal Jacket'', ''A Clockwork Orange''
Influences	Max Ophüls, Sergei Eisenstein, Elia Kazan, David Lynch, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Orson Welles, Pavel Klushantsev
Influenced	Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero, Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Gaspar Noé, Michael Moore, Tim Burton, P.T. Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Matt Groening, Frank Darabont
Death date	March 07, 1999
Death place	Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Religion	Agnostic
Death cause	Heart attack
Spouse	Toba Etta Metz (1948–51; divorced)Ruth Sobotka (1954–57; divorced)Christiane Harlan (1958–99; his death)
Occupation	Film director, film producer, film editor, screenwriter, cinematographer
Years active	1951–1999 }}

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, his reluctance to talk about his films, and his reclusiveness. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors.

Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail. His later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism and often lack structured linear narrative. His films are frequently described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. A recurring theme in his films is man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, some critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.

The film that first brought him attention from many critics was ''Paths of Glory'', the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of his films at first got a lukewarm reception, only to be acclaimed years later as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on later generations of film-makers. Considered groundbreaking was ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', noted for being one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while also maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film ''A Clockwork Orange'' from Great Britain, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. Both living authors Anthony Burgess (eventually) and Stephen King (immediately) were unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels ''A Clockwork Orange'' and ''The Shining'' respectively; both authors became involved with subsequent stage or TV adaptations. His films were largely successful at the box-office, although ''Barry Lyndon'' performed poorly in the United States. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s onward, except ''The Shining'', were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.

Even though all his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, frequently disparaged Kubrick's work, Ankeny describes Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."

Early years

Family life

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York, the first of two children born to Jewish parents, Jacques (Jacob) Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Sadie Gertrude (''née'' Perveler; 1903–85). His sister, Barbara Mary Kubrick, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romanian and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.

Kubrick biographer, Geoffrey Cocks, writes that although Kubrick descended from eastern European Jews, and was raised in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, his family was not religious, although his parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony. When critic Michel Ciment asked him in 1980 whether he had a religious upbringing, Kubrick replied "No, not at all." He had no bar mitzvah and apparently did not attend synagogue. Although after his death, both his daughter and wife stated that "He did not deny his Jewishness, not at all." His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, to have been called ''Aryan Papers'', and spent years researching the subject. Most of his friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe.

A friend of Kubrick's family notes that although his father was a prominent doctor, "Stanley and his mom were such regular people. They had no airs about them. . . . His mother was so down to earth, she was lovely." As a boy, he was considered "bookish" and generally uninterested in activities in his Bronx neighborhood. According to a friend, "When we were teenagers hanging around the Bronx, he was just another bright, neurotic, talented guy—just another guy trying to get into a game with my softball club and mess around with girls . . ." Many of his friends from his "close knit neighborhood" would become involved with his early films, including writing music scores and scripts.

Chess and photography hobbies

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. Kubrick later recalled the significance of his chess hobby to his career:

He also bought his son a Graflex camera when he was thirteen, triggering a fascination with still photography. As a teenager, Kubrick was interested in jazz, and briefly attempted a career as a drummer. His father was disappointed in his failure to achieve excellence in school, which he felt Stanley was capable of. His father encouraged him to read from his large library at home while at the same time permitting him to take up photography as a serious hobby. These additional interests outside of school may have ironically contributed to his poor performance as a student. However, British screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked closely with him in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars," noting that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality." He points out, nonetheless, that when Kubrick died, "few of the obituaries mentioned that he was a Jew."

High school

Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 45. He was a poor student, with a meager 67 grade average. According to his English teacher, Kubrick was not a great student, and school didn't interest him. However, "the idea of literature and the reading of literature, from a non-academic, from a more human point of view, clearly was what interested him. He was a literary guy even as a young man . . . " Kubrick also had a poor attendance record, and often skipped school to take in double feature films.

He graduated from high school in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated any hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him. His parents sent him to live with relatives for a year in Los Angeles in the hopes that it would help his academic growth.

While still in high school, he was chosen as an official school photographer for a year. In 1946, since he was not able to gain admission to day session classes at colleges, he briefly attended evening classes at the City College of New York (CCNY) and then left. Eventually, he sought jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a photographic series to ''Look'' magazine. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs. He became an apprentice photographer for ''Look'' in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer. (Many early [1945–50] photographs by Kubrick have been published in the book ''Drama and Shadows'' [2005, Phaidon Press] and also appear as a special feature on the 2007 Special Edition DVD of ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.)

During his ''Look'' magazine years, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b. January 24, 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived in Greenwich Village, eventually divorcing in 1951. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the cinemas of New York City. He was inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style, and by director Elia Kazan, who he described as America's "best director" at that time, with his ability of "performing miracles" with his actors.

Film career and later life

Early works

In 1951, Kubrick's friend Alex Singer persuaded him to start making short documentaries for ''The March of Time'', a provider of newsreels to movie theatres. Kubrick agreed, and shot the independently financed ''Day of the Fight'' in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse tracking shot, which would become one of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Although its distributor went out of business that year, Kubrick has been said to have sold ''Day of the Fight'' to RKO Pictures for a profit of $100, although Kubrick himself said he lost $100 in ''Jeremy Bernstein, Interview With Stanley Kubrick'' in 1966. Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at ''Look'' magazine and began working on his second short documentary, ''Flying Padre'' (1951), funded by RKO. A third short film, ''The Seafarers'' (1953) was filmed just after his first feature ''Fear and Desire'' (see below) in order to recoup costs. It was a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers' International Union and was Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre. It is believed, however, that he was involved in other shorts, which have been lost—most notably ''World Assembly of Youth'' (1952). He also served as second unit director on an episode of the ''Omnibus'' television program about the life of Abraham Lincoln. None of these shorts has ever been officially released, though they have been widely bootlegged, and clips are used in the documentary ''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures''. In addition, ''Day of the Fight'' and ''Flying Padre'' have been shown on TCM.

1950s: ''Fear and Desire'', ''Killer's Kiss'', ''The Killing'' and ''Paths of Glory''

Kubrick moved to narrative feature films with ''Fear and Desire'' (1953), the story of a team of soldiers caught behind enemy lines in a fictional war. While wracked with anxiety about how they will escape, they stumble across a woman whom they capture for fear of her reporting them. One of the soldiers begins to fall in love with her, but shoots her when she tries to escape. He then abandons the troop. Another soldier becomes unsatisfied with a simple escape down the river and persuades the remaining soldiers to engage in a scheme to kill a general in a surprise attack at a nearby base.

Kubrick and his then-wife, Toba Metz, were the only crew on the film, which was written by Kubrick's friend Howard Sackler, who later became a successful playwright. ''Fear and Desire'' garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in life, Kubrick was embarrassed by the film, which he dismissed as an amateur effort. He refused to allow ''Fear and Desire'' to be shown at retrospectives and public screenings and did everything possible to keep it out of circulation. At least one copy remained in the archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies.

Kubrick's marriage to Toba Metz ended during the making of ''Fear and Desire''. He met his second wife, Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York's East Village from 1952 until their marriage on January 15, 1955. They moved to Hollywood that summer. Sobotka, who made a cameo appearance in Kubrick's next film, ''Killer's Kiss'' (1955), also served as art director on ''The Killing'' (1956). Like ''Fear and Desire,'' ''Killer's Kiss'' is a short feature film, with a running time of slightly more than an hour. It met with limited commercial and critical success. The film is about a young heavyweight boxer at the end of his career who gets involved in a love triangle in which his rival is involved with organized crime. Both ''Fear and Desire'' and ''Killer's Kiss'' were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.

Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named James B. Harris, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would finance three out of the next four Kubrick films. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White novel ''Clean Break'', which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson turned into ''The Killing''. The story is about a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong after the mobsters get away with the money. (The film title may refer either to the robbery or the subsequent murder of a group of mobsters by a jealous boyfriend). Starring Sterling Hayden, ''The Killing'' was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. As does the novel's narration, the story in the film is told out of sequence in a non-linear narrative as a consequence of retelling the events of the same day (and sometimes the same events) from the perspective of different characters. (This is not the same as using successive multiple in-world flashbacks as ''Citizen Kane'' does.) While this technique was highly unusual for contemporary 1950s American cinema, it was imitated nearly 40 years later in ''Reservoir Dogs'' by director Quentin Tarantino who has acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, and critics have noticed the similarity in plot structure. In many ways, ''The Killing'' followed the conventions of film noir, both in its plotting and cinematography style. That kind of crime caper film had peaked in the 1940s; but today, many regard this film as one of the best of the noir genre. While it was not a financial success, it received good reviews.

The widespread admiration for ''The Killing'' brought Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio offered them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to choose their next project. During this time, Kubrick also collaborated with Calder Willingham on an adaptation of the Austrian novel ''The Burning Secret''. Although Kubrick was enthusiastic about the project, it was eventually shelved.

Kubrick's next film ''Paths of Glory'' was set during World War I and based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are charged with cowardice and sentenced to death, allegedly as an example to the troops, but actually serving as scapegoats for the failings of their commanders. Kirk Douglas was cast as Colonel Dax, a humanitarian officer who tries to prevent the soldiers' execution. Douglas was instrumental in securing financing for the ambitious production. The film was not a significant commercial success, but it was critically acclaimed and widely admired within the industry, establishing Kubrick as a major up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics over the years have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Spielberg has named this one of his favorite Kubrick films.

During the production of ''Paths of Glory'' in Munich, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan (credited by her stage name, "Susanne Christian"), who played the only female speaking part in the film. Kubrick divorced his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, in 1957. Christiane Susanne Harlan (b. 1932 in Germany) belonged to a theatrical family and had trained as an actress. She and Kubrick married in 1958 and remained together until his death in 1999. During her marriage to Kubrick, Christiane concentrated on her career as a painter. In addition to raising Christiane's young daughter Katharina (b. 1953) from her first marriage to the late German actor Werner Bruhns (d. 1977), the couple had two daughters, Anya (1959–2009) and Vivian (b. 1960). Christiane's brother Jan Harlan was Kubrick's executive producer from 1975 onward.

1960s: ''Spartacus'', ''Lolita'', ''Dr. Strangelove'' and ''2001: A Space Odyssey''

Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon Brando vehicle ''One-Eyed Jacks'' (1961). The two clashed over a number of casting decisions, and Brando eventually fired him and decided to direct the picture himself. Kubrick worked on a number of unproduced screenplays, including ''Lunatic at Large'', which Kubrick intended to develop into a movie, until Kirk Douglas asked him to take over Douglas' epic production ''Spartacus'' (1960) from Anthony Mann, who had been fired by the studio two weeks into shooting.

Based upon the true story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves, ''Spartacus'' was a difficult production. Creative differences arose between Kubrick and Douglas, and the two reportedly had a stormy working relationship. Frustrated by his lack of creative control, Kubrick later largely disowned the film, which further angered Douglas. The friendship the two men had formed on ''Paths of Glory'' was destroyed by the experience of making ''Spartacus''. Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented shit."

Despite the on-set troubles, ''Spartacus'' was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director. However, its embattled production convinced Kubrick to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining independent of its production system, which he called "film by fiat, film by frenzy."

''Spartacus'' is the only Stanley Kubrick film in which the director had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing credit, or any say in casting. It was largely Kirk Douglas's project.

''Spartacus'' would go on to win 4 Oscars with one going to Peter Ustinov, for his turn as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction.

In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film ''Lolita'', and would live there for the rest of his life. The original motivation was to film ''Lolita'' in a country with laxer censorship laws. However, Kubrick had to remain in England to film ''Dr. Strangelove'' since divorce proceedings prevented Peter Sellers from leaving the country, and the filming of ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' required the Shepperton Studios sound stages for their large capacity, which was unavailable in America. It was after filming the first two of these films in England and in the early planning stages of ''2001'' that Kubrick decided to settle in England permanently.

Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code seal, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocativeness by treading lightly with its theme. Kubrick tried to make some elements more acceptable by omitting all material referring to Humbert's lifelong infatuation with "nymphets" and possibly ensuring Lolita looked like a teenager. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of ''Lolita'' decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. Nonetheless, Kubrick had liaised with the censors during production and it was only "slightly edited", in particular removing the eroticism between Lolita and Humbert. As a result, the novel's more sensual aspects were toned down in the final cut, leaving much to the viewer's imagination. Kubrick would later say that had he known the severity of the censorship he would face, he probably would not have made the film.

''Lolita'' was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy. The book, by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, had been one of the most controversial novels of the century, already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a ''cause célèbre'', given its theme, when Kubrick embarked on the project. It dealt with an affair between a middle-aged professor named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. The difficult subject matter was mocked in the film's famous tagline, "How did they ever make a film of ''Lolita''?" Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a 400-page screenplay, which he then reduced to 200. Nabokov estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the final screenplay, which was written by Kubrick himself. The shorter version of Nabokov's original draft was later published under the title ''Lolita: A Screenplay''.

''Lolita'' was the first of two times Kubrick worked with British comic actor Peter Sellers, the second being ''Dr. Strangelove'' (1964). Sellers plays Clare Quilty, a second older man (unknown to Humbert) who is involved with Lolita, serving dramatically as Humbert's darker doppelganger. In the novel, Quilty is behind the scenes for most of the story, but Kubrick brings him to the foreground, resulting in an expansion of his role (although it is only about thirty minutes of screen time). Exercising his dramatic license, Kubrick had Quilty pretend to be multiple characters in the film, allowing Sellers to employ his gift for mock accents.

Critical reception of the film was mixed; many praised it for its daring subject matter, while others were surprised by the lack of intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. Andrew Sarris panned it in ''The Village Voice'' for being miscast and too restrained, and it was also panned in London's ''The Observer'' and by Eric Rhode on BBC Television News. The film was highly praised by Pauline Kael in ''The New Yorker'', though she later became one of Kubrick's greatest detractors. Recent reviews of the film in conjunction with its DVD release have been overwhelmingly positive. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Sue Lyon, who played the title role, won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer.

Film critic Gene Youngblood holds that stylistically ''Lolita'' is a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to the surrealism of the later films."

Kubrick's next project, ''Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'' (1964), became a cult film and is now considered a classic. Roger Ebert called it the best satirical film ever made. The screenplay—based upon the novel ''Red Alert'', by ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant)—was co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern. ''Red Alert'' is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear conflict so absurd that the story became a sinister, macabre comedy. Once re-conceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.

The story centers on an unauthorized American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, initiated by renegade U.S.A.F. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden). All U.S. bombers are at their fail-safe points, from which they cannot proceed without direct orders. When Ripper issues false attack orders, the planes will only return in response to a prearranged recall code. The film intercuts between three locales: Ripper's Air Force Base, where RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) tries to stop the mad Gen. Ripper by obtaining the code; the Pentagon War Room, where the President of the United States (Sellers) and U.S.A.F. Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) try to develop a strategy with the Soviets to stop Gen. Ripper's B-52 bombers from dropping nuclear bombs on Russia; and Major Kong's (Slim Pickens) B-52 bomber, where he and his crew (never realizing their orders are false) doggedly try to complete their mission. It soon becomes clear that Kong's bomber may reach Russia, since, unlike all the other bombers, his damaged radio cannot receive the recall code Mandrake has deduced from Gen. Ripper's notes. At this point, the character of Dr. Strangelove (Sellers' third role) is introduced. His Nazi-style plans for ensuring the survival of the fittest of the human race in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust are the black-comedy highlight of the film.

Peter Sellers, who had played a pivotal part in ''Lolita'' and had appeared in several previous films in multiple roles, was hired to play four roles in ''Dr. Strangelove''. He eventually played three, due to an injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major "King" Kong's Texas accent. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and allowed Sellers to improvise, as he had earlier on the set of ''Lolita''.

Although, Peter Sellers would later become an international star after the release of his subsequent Pink Panther films and ''What's New Pussycat'', at the time ''Doctor Strangelove'' was released Peter Sellers was still mainly a British comedy actor, relatively unknown in the United States. Although this was the sixth film with Peter Sellers in multiple roles, most American viewers did not initially realize that Kubrick had cast him in three roles, all with distinctly different appearances, accents, and personalities. Dr. Strangelove is a manic German mad scientist, while the bald President of the United States is a mild-mannered model of sanity (the "straight man" of the comedy) with an American MidWestern accent, and Lional Mandrake is a stiff and stuffy mustachioed British officer.

The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. It was highly irreverent toward war policies of the U.S., which were largely considered sacrosanct up to that time. Eight months after the release of ''Strangelove'', the straight thriller ''Fail-Safe'' with a plot remarkably similar to that of ''Dr. Strangelove'' was released. ''Strangelove'' earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.

Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968). The film was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". Kubrick reportedly told Clarke that his intention was to make "the proverbial great science fiction film."

''2001'' begins four million years ago with an encounter between a group of apes and a mysterious black monolith, which seems to trigger in them the ability to use a bone as both a tool and a weapon. This new knowledge allows them to reclaim a water hole from another group of apes, who have no tool-wielding ability. A victorious ape tosses his bone into the air, at which point the film makes a celebrated match-cut to an orbiting satellite, circa 2000. At this time, a group of Americans at their moon base dig up a monolith similar to that encountered by the apes, which sends a radio signal to Jupiter. Eighteen months later, a group of astronauts aboard the spaceship Discovery are sent to explore Jupiter, their true purpose of investigating the signal is initially concealed from them. During the flight, the ship's sentient HAL 9000 computer, aware of the truth about the mission, malfunctions but resists disconnection. Believing its control of the mission to be crucial, the computer terminates life support for most of the crew before it is shut down by the surviving astronaut, David Bowman (Keir Dullea). Using a space pod, Bowman explores another monolith in orbit around Jupiter, whereupon he is hurled into a portal in space at high speed, witnessing many strange cosmological phenomena. His interstellar journey ends with his transformation into a fetus-like new being enclosed in an orb of light, last seen gazing at Earth from space.

The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time. The groundbreaking visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and were engineered by a team that included a young Douglas Trumbull, who would become famous in his own right for his work on the films ''Silent Running'' and ''Blade Runner''. Kubrick extensively used traveling matte photography to film space flight, a technique also used nine years later by George Lucas in making ''Star Wars'', although that film also used motion-control effects that were unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography to film the Stargate sequence. The film's striking cinematography was the work of legendary British director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth, who would later photograph classic films such as ''Cabaret'' and ''Superman''. Manufacturing companies were consulted as to what the design of both special-purpose and everyday objects would look like in the future. In a filmed press conference before the Los Angeles premiere of the film, later released as a DVD extra, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a generation of engineers would design real spacecraft based upon ''2001'' "...even if it isn't the best way to do it." The film also is a rare instance of portraying space travel realistically, with complete silence in the vacuum of space and a realistic representation of weightlessness.

The film is famous for using classical music in place of an original score. Richard Strauss's ''Also sprach Zarathustra'' and Johann Strauss's ''The Blue Danube'' waltz became indelibly associated with the film for a while, especially the former, as it was not well known to the public prior to the film. Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti, although some of the pieces were altered without Ligeti's consent. The appearance of ''Atmospheres'', ''Lux Aeterna'', and ''Requiem'' on the ''2001'' soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. This use of "program" music was not originally planned. Kubrick had commissioned composer Alex North to write a full-length score for the film, but Kubrick became so attached to the temporary soundtrack he had constructed during editing that he dropped the idea of an original score entirely.

Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial critical reaction was extremely hostile, with critics attacking the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt, who called it (in ''The New Yorker'') "some kind of a great film". Word of mouth among young audiences—especially the 1960s counterculture audience, who loved the movie's "Star Gate" sequence, a seemingly psychedelic journey to the infinite reaches of the cosmos—made the film a hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award Kubrick ever received was for supervising the special effects of ''2001: A Space Odyssey''. Today, however, many consider it the greatest science fiction film ever made, and it is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.

Artistically, ''2001'' was a radical departure from Kubrick's previous films. It contains only 45 minutes of spoken dialogue, over a running time of two hours and twenty minutes. The fairly mundane dialogue is mostly superfluous to the images and music. The film's most memorable dialogue belongs to the computer HAL in HAL's exchanges with Dave Bowman. Some argue that Kubrick is portraying a future humanity largely dissociated from a sterile and antiseptic machine-driven environment. The film's ambiguous, perplexing ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.

Interpretations of ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' are numerous and diverse. Despite having been released in 1968, it still prompts debate today. When critic Joseph Gelmis asked Kubrick about the meaning of the film, Kubrick replied:

They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.

''2001: A Space Odyssey'' is perhaps Kubrick's most famous and influential film. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's big bang, focusing attention upon the space race. It was a precursor to the explosion of the science fiction film market nine years later, which began with the release of ''Star Wars'' and ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind''.

1970s: ''A Clockwork Orange'' and ''Barry Lyndon''

After ''2001'', Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon. When financing fell through, Kubrick went looking for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He eventually settled on ''A Clockwork Orange'' (1971). His adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel is a dark, shocking exploration of violence in human society. The film was initially released with an X rating in the United States and caused considerable controversy. The film's iconic poster imagery was created by legendary designer Bill Gold.

The story for ''A Clockwork Orange'' takes place in a futuristic Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic. The central character is a teenage hooligan named Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), who, along with his companion "droogs", gleefully torments, beats, robs, tortures, and rapes without conscience or remorse. His brutal beating and murder of an older woman finally lands Alex in prison. Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico Technique, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. At the public demonstration of the success of the technique, Alex is treated cruelly but does not fight back; the treatment has made him less than human. He has been conditioned against classical music, his love of which was his one human feature, and apparently all of his sex drive is gone. We further see hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated. After being freed, he is found by his former partners in crime who had betrayed him and who are now policemen, and they beat him mercilessly.

He then comes to the home of a political writer who disdains "the modern age" and is initially sympathetic to Alex's plight until he recognizes Alex as the young man who brutally raped his wife and paralyzed him a few years before. Alex then becomes a pawn in a political game.

Kubrick held that the film held comparisons between both the left and right end of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated, "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left...They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."

Kubrick photographed ''A Clockwork Orange'' quickly and almost entirely on location in and around London. Despite the low-tech nature of the film as compared to ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', Kubrick showed his talent for innovation; at one point, he threw "an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted electronic music composer Wendy Carlos—at the time, known as Walter Carlos (''Switched-On Bach'')—to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer.

It is pivotal to the plot that the lead character, Alex, is fond of classical music, and that the brainwashing Ludovico treatment accidentally conditions him against classical music. As such, it was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' of using a great deal of classical music in the score. However, in this film, classical music accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality rather than of graceful space flight and mysterious alien presences. Both Pauline Kael (who generally disliked Kubrick's work after ''Lolita'') and Roger Ebert (who often praises Kubrick) found Kubrick's use of juxtaposing classical music and violence in this film unpleasant, Ebert calling it a "cute, cheap, dead-end dimension," and Kael, "self-important." Burgess, in his introduction to his own stage adaptation of the novel, held that ultimately, classical music is what will finally redeem Alex.

The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence. It was released in the same year as Sam Peckinpah's ''Straw Dogs'' and Don Siegel's ''Dirty Harry'', and the three films sparked a ferocious debate in the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in ''A Clockwork Orange.'' British readers of the novel noted that Kubrick had omitted the final chapter (also omitted from American editions of the book) in which Alex finds redemption and sanity.

After receiving death threats to himself and his family as a result of the controversy, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain. It was unavailable in the United Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Kubrick's death, although it could be seen in continental Europe. The Scala cinema in London's Kings Cross showed the film in the early 1990s, and at Kubrick's insistence, the cinema was sued and put out of business, thus depriving London of one of its very few independent cinemas. It is now the Scala club. In early 1973, Kubrick re-released ''A Clockwork Orange'' to cinemas in the United States with footage modified so that it could get its rating reduced to an R. This enabled many more newspapers to advertise it, since in 1972 many newspapers had stopped carrying any advertising for X-rated films due to the new association of that rating with pornography.

In the mid-1990s, a documentary entitled ''Forbidden Fruit'', about the censorship controversy, was released in Britain. Kubrick was unable to prevent the documentary makers from including footage from ''A Clockwork Orange'' in their film.

Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's ''The Luck of Barry Lyndon'', also known as ''Barry Lyndon,'' a picaresque novel about the adventures and misadventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. After serving in the Prussian army, Lyndon slowly insinuates himself into English high society, eventually marrying the Countess of Lyndon. The world of the aristocracy turns out to be a hollow paradise, dull and decaying. Lyndon is ultimately unable to maintain his good standing there and falls from grace after a series of persecutions.

Reviewers such as Pauline Kael, who had been critical of Kubrick's previous work, found ''Barry Lyndon'' a cold, slow-moving, and lifeless film. Its measured pace and length—more than three hours—put off many American critics and audiences, although it received positive reviews from Rex Reed and Richard Schickel. ''TIME'' magazine published a cover story about the film, and Kubrick was nominated for three Academy Awards. The film as a whole was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, more than any other Kubrick film. Despite this, ''Barry Lyndon'' was not a box office success in the U.S., although the film found a great audience in Europe, particularly in France. The French journal of film criticism, ''Cahiers du cinéma'', included ''Barry Lyndon'' at 67 on its top 100 list of all-time films.

As with most of Kubrick's films, ''Barry Lyndon'''s reputation has grown through the years, particularly among other filmmakers. Director Martin Scorsese has cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Steven Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", though, when younger, he famously described it "like going through the Prado without lunch."

As in his other films, Kubrick's cinematography and lighting techniques were highly innovative. Most famously, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. This allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings.

Like its two predecessors, the film does not have an original score. Irish traditional songs (performed by The Chieftains) are combined with works such as Antonio Vivaldi's Cello Concerto in B, a Johann Sebastian Bach Double Concerto, George Frideric Handel's ''Sarabande'' from the Keyboard suite in D minor (HWV 437), and Franz Schubert's German Dance No. 1 in C major, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, and Impromptu No. 1 in C minor. The music was conducted and adapted by Leonard Rosenman, for which he won an Oscar.

In 1976, production designer Ken Adam, who had worked with Kubrick on ''Dr. Strangelove'' and ''Barry Lyndon'', asked Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie ''The Spy Who Loved Me''. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. This was honored until after his death in 1999, when in 2000 the fact was revealed by Adam in the documentary on the making of ''The Spy Who Loved Me'' on the special edition DVD release of the movie.

1980s: ''The Shining'' and ''Full Metal Jacket''

The pace of Kubrick's work slowed considerably after ''Barry Lyndon'', and he did not make another film for five years. ''The Shining'', released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The film starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as an off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a high-class resort deep in the Colorado mountains. The job requires spending the winter in the isolated hotel with his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny (played by Danny Lloyd), who is gifted with a form of telepathy—the "shining" of the film's title.

As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awaken, displaying horrible, phantasmagoric images to Danny, and driving his father Jack into a homicidal psychosis.

The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the exception of second-unit exterior footage, which was filmed in Colorado, Montana, and Oregon. In order to convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth hand-held camera movement in scenes where a conventional camera track was impractical. Although used for some scenes in a few previous motion pictures, Garrett Brown, Steadicam's inventor, was closely involved with this production and regarded it as the first picture to fully employ the new system's potential.

More than any of his other films, ''The Shining'' gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a megalomaniac perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film was shot). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman.

Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." In 1997, King collaborated with Mick Garris to create a television miniseries version of the novel that was more faithful to King's original.

The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans, ''The Shining'' is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Hitchcock’s ''Psycho'' (1960), William Friedkin’s ''The Exorcist'' (1973), and other horror classics. Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum" and "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" as well as "Here's Johnny!". The financial success of ''The Shining'' renewed Warner Brothers' faith in Kubrick's ability to make artistically satisfying and profitable films after the commercial failure of ''Barry Lyndon'' in the United States.

Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, ''Full Metal Jacket'' (1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel ''The Short-Timers,'' starring Matthew Modine as Joker, Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence. Kubrick said to film critic Steven Hall that his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither antiwar or prowar", held "no moral or political position", and was primarily concerned with "the way things are."

The first half of the film takes place during basic training at boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina. Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly pushes his recruits to transform them into motivated and disciplined killing machines. He instructs recruits to be "married" to their rifles treating them like a spouse, and to give their rifles girl's names. A slow-witted recruit, Private Lawrence, whom Hartman nicknamed "Gomer Pyle", eventually cracks under the strain, starting to talk to his rifle. He is found loading live ammunition into it in the restroom, whereupon he first kills Sergeant Hartman and then himself. This sequence only takes up about a fifth of the novel, but fully half of the film.

The second half of the film jumps abruptly to Vietnam, following Joker who has been promoted to sergeant. As a reporter for the United States military's newspaper, ''Stars and Stripes'', Joker occupies war's middle ground, using wit and sarcasm to detach himself from the carnage around him. Joker also takes part in actual combat. The film climaxes in a bloody battle between Joker's platoon and a sniper hiding in the rubble who kills three of Joker's men. The sniper is revealed to be a teenage girl. She is eventually severely injured by Joker's partner, and Joker then shoots her to put her out of her misery.

Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge for Kubrick and his production team. Much of the filming was done in the Docklands area of London, with the ruined-city set created by production designer Anton Furst. As a result, the film is visually very different from other Vietnam War films such as ''Platoon'' and ''Hamburger Hill'', most of which were shot in the Far East. Instead of a tropical, Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war generally portrayed (and thus perceived) as jungle warfare, notwithstanding significant urban skirmishes like the Tet offensive. As actor Adam Baldwin put it "When you think of Vietnam, its natural to imagine jungles. But this story is about urban warfare". Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. During the making of the film, Kubrick was also helped by R. Lee Ermey, who acted and worked as technical adviser.

''Full Metal Jacket'' received mixed critical reviews on release but also found a reasonably large audience, despite being overshadowed by Oliver Stone's ''Platoon'' and Clint Eastwood's ''Heartbreak Ridge''. Like Kubrick's other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.

1990s: ''Eyes Wide Shut''

Kubrick's final film was ''Eyes Wide Shut'' (1999), starring then-married-to-each-other actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Freudian novella ''Traumnovelle'' (''Dream Story'' in English), although the story has been moved from Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. The film follows Dr. William Harford's journey into the sexual underworld of New York City, motivated by his shock at his wife's revelations to him of her recent fantasy of abandoning him and their child for a handsome soldier.

Actor Jack Nicholson, who starred in ''The Shining'', describes the film's theme as delving into questions about the "dangers of married life," and the "silent desperations of keeping an ongoing relationship alive," although "Stanley was very much a family man." Kubrick's wife explains that "over the years he would see friends getting divorced and remarried, and the topic [of the film] would come up." She knew that this was a subject he wanted to make into a film. Kidman notes that "Stanley's expectations of people were not really high," adding, however, that his wife, with whom he had been married for over 41 years, "was the love of his life. He would talk about her, he adored her, something that people didn't know. His daughters adored them . . . I would see that, and he would talk about them very proudly."

When Kubrick directed this film, although he was seventy years of age, he worked continually for nearly fifteen months to complete the film by its established U.S. release date of July 16, 1999. Press releases had been sent to the media, stating briefly that "Stanley Kubrick's next film will be ''Eyes Wide Shut'', a story of jealousy and sexual obsession . . . " He worked 18 hours a day, all the while maintaining complete confidentiality about the film, which was to become his last. He sent an unfinished preview copy to the stars and producers a few months before release. However, his sudden death on March 7, 1999, came a few days after he finished editing, and he never saw the final version when it was released to the public. Biographer Michel Ciment believes that "he literally worked himself to death," trying to complete the film to his liking. Ciment explains that Kubrick's desire to keep this, and many of his earlier films, private and unpublicized during its production, was an expression of Kubrick's "will to power," and not a penchant for secrecy: }}

The film was in production for more than two years, and two of the main members of the cast, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, were replaced in the course of the filming. Although it is set in New York City, the film was mostly shot on London soundstages, with little location shooting. Shots of Manhattan itself were pickup shots filmed in New York City by a second-unit crew. Because of Kubrick's secrecy about the film, mostly inaccurate rumors abounded about its plot and content. Most especially, the story's sexual content provoked speculation, some journalists writing that it would be "the sexiest film ever made." The casting of then celebrity-actor supercouple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a husband-wife couple in the film along with Kubrick's characteristic secrecy increased the pre-release journalistic hyperbole.

''Eyes Wide Shut'', like ''Lolita'' and ''A Clockwork Orange'' before it, faced censorship before release. In the United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes so as to secure an R rating from the MPAA. In Europe, and the rest of the world, the film has been released uncut, in its original form. The October 2007 DVD reissue contains the uncut version, making it available to North American audiences for the first time.

Co-star Nicole Kidman explains that while some critics describe the film's theme as "dark," in essence "it is a very hopeful film." During one interview in the documentary, ''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures'', she states that Kubrick was indirectly stressing the moral values of "commitment and loyalty," adding that "ultimately, ''Eyes Wide Shut'' is about that commitment." Sidney Pollack, who acted in the film, adds that "the heart of [the film] was illustrating a truth about relationships and sexuality. But it was not illustrated in a literal way, but in a theatrical way." Michel Ciment agrees with Kidman, and likewise notes the positive meaning underlying the film, pointing out how some of it is voiced through the dialog, and suggests that the words "resonate like an epitaph" to Kubrick:

Death

In 1999—four days after screening a final cut of ''Eyes Wide Shut'' for his family, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives—70-year-old Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England, U.K.

Following his death, several directors and actors discussed their experiences with Kubrick. Steven Spielberg said in a 1999 interview that ''Dr. Strangelove'' made him forget about being drafted into the Army.

In 2001, a number of persons who had worked with him on his films over the years, created the documentary ''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures'', released by Warner Bros. It was produced and directed by Kubrick's brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who had also been executive producer of Kubrick's last four films. The camera and sound for the documentary was managed by his son, Manuel Harlan, who was also the still photographer for ''Eyes Wide Shut'' and video operator for ''Full Metal Jacket''.

Projects completed by others

''One-Eyed Jacks''

''The Hollywood Reporter'' announced on October 18, 1956 that producer Frank Rosenberg had bought rights to Charles Neider's novel ''The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones'' for $40,000. Two years later, Pennebaker Inc., Marlon Brando's independent production company, bought the rights to the novel as well as Sam Peckinpah's first-draft screenplay adaptation for $150,000. Even at this time, it was announced that Brando might direct.

Later that year, Kubrick was announced as director of ''Gun's Up'', the working title for the production. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to ''One-Eyed Jacks'' and Pina Pellicer was announced as "the unanimous choice of Brando, Rosenberg, and Kubrick" to play the female lead.

On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of ''One-Eyed Jacks'', stating that he had the utmost respect for Marlon Brando as one of "the world's foremost artists" but had recently acquired the rights to Nabokov's ''Lolita'' and wanted to begin production work immediately in light of this wonderful opportunity. Speaking more candidly in a 1960 interview Kubrick stated, "When I left Brando's picture, it still didn't have a finished script. It had just become obvious to me that Brando wanted to direct the movie. I was just sort of playing wingman for Brando, to see that nobody shot him down." The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando.

''A.I. Artificial Intelligence''

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss on an expansion of his short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" into a three-act film, along with other writers, such as Sara Maitland and Ian Watson, under various names, including ''Pinocchio'' and ''Artificial Intelligence''. It was a futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, sold as a temporary surrogate to a family whose real son is in suspended animation with a deadly disease. The story focuses on the efforts of the robot to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to ''Pinocchio''.

Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his. In 1999, following Kubrick's death, Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay and, in association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, made the movie ''A.I. Artificial Intelligence.'' The film was released in June 2001.

The film contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. The film contains many recurrent Kubrick motifs, such as an omniscient narrator, an extreme form of the three-act structure, the themes of humanity and inhumanity, and a sardonic view of Freudian psychology. In addition, John Williams' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.

Many critics found the film to be a peculiar merging of the disparate sensibilities of Stanley Kubrick and Spielberg. In a mostly positive review, Tim Merrill wrote }}

Unrealized projects

Frequent and memorable collaborators

Kubrick did not generally reuse actors on film after film in the manner of John Ford, Martin Scorsese, and Akira Kurosawa. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with the same actor more than once. In lead roles, Sterling Hayden appeared in both ''The Killing'' and ''Dr. Strangelove'', Peter Sellers in ''Lolita'' and ''Dr. Strangelove'', and Kirk Douglas in ''Paths of Glory'' and ''Spartacus''. In supporting roles, Joe Turkel appears in ''The Killing'', ''Paths of Glory'', and ''The Shining'', Philip Stone appears in ''A Clockwork Orange'', ''Barry Lyndon'', and ''The Shining'', Leonard Rossiter is featured in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ''Barry Lyndon'', while Timothy Carey is in both ''The Killing'' and ''Paths of Glory''. ''A Clockwork Orange'' and ''Barry Lyndon'' saw the largest crossover, with six actors (including Patrick Magee) having roles of various lengths in each film.

Although Kubrick had a reputation as a non-collaborative and controlling director, he atypically allowed actors Peter Sellers (in both ''Lolita'' and ''Doctor Strangelove'') and R. Lee Ermey (in ''Full Metal Jacket'') to freely improvise most of their own dialogue.

Photographer Dmitri Kasterine, himself regarded as "one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Britain from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s", began a long association with film director Stanley Kubrick in 1964, when he began shooting stills during filming of ''Dr Strangelove'' and later era-defining projects, ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ''A Clockwork Orange''. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kasterine was commissioned to take portraits of Kubrick for publications including the ''Daily Telegraph Magazine, Harpers & Queen'' and a variety of his work was published in ''The Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview,'' and ''The New York Times.'' Though Kubrick was noted for keeping his production sets extremely private by banning uninvited visitors, Kasterine was allowed onto the sets of numerous Kubrick films to shoot both candid and posed photos. In 2010 and 2011, many of his Kubrick photos were on display for the first time in the United Kingdom at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Four writers who co-authored screenplays with Kubrick subsequently wrote memoirs of their experience working with Kubrick. Arthur C. Clarke's ''The Lost Worlds of 2001'' traces all the intermediate versions of the story from first draft to final project. Diane Johnson published an essay about her experience collaborating with Kubrick and has discussed it frequently in both lectures and interviews. Michael Herr, Kubrick's co-screenwriter on ''Full Metal Jacket'' wrote a book simply titled ''Kubrick'' which covers not only his collaboration on the film, but also his friendship with the director over the last 20 years of his life. Kubrick's co-screenwriter on ''Eyes Wide Shut'', Frederic Raphael, wrote a notoriously unflattering memoir of Kubrick entitled ''Eyes Wide Open'' which has been denounced by Kubrick's family, notably on Christianne Kubrick's website Similarly, Diane Johnson has stated

Two authors of studies of Kubrick's films, Alexander Walker and Michel Ciment, worked closely with Kubrick on their books, with Kubrick personally providing the authors with many production photos and film stills and crucial information about the production of his films. Walker's book ''Stanley Kubrick, Director'' saw both a 1972 (entitled ''Stanley Kubrick Directs'') and a 2000 edition, and Michel Ciment's book ''Stanley Kubrick'' saw both a 1980 and 2003 edition (the latter called ''Stanley Kubrick- The Definitive Edition'')

One of Kubrick's longest collaborations was with Leon Vitali, who, after playing the older Lord Bullingdon in ''Barry Lyndon'', became Kubrick's personal assistant, working as the casting director on his following films, and supervising film-to-video transfers for Kubrick. He also appeared in ''Eyes Wide Shut'', playing the ominous Red Cloak, who confronts Tom Cruise during the infamous orgy scene. Since Kubrick's death, Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick's films. He has also collaborated frequently with ''Eyes Wide Shut'' co-star Todd Field on his pictures.

Family cameos

Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian has cameos in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (as Heywood Floyd's daughter), ''Barry Lyndon'' (as a girl at the birthday party for young Bryan Lyndon), ''The Shining'' (as a party ghost), and ''Full Metal Jacket'' (as a TV reporter). His stepdaughter Katharina has cameos in ''A Clockwork Orange'' and ''Eyes Wide Shut'', and her character's son in the latter is played by her real son. Kubrick's wife Christiane Kubrick appeared prior to her marriage to Kubrick in ''Paths of Glory'', billed as Susanne Christian (her birth name is Christiane Susanne Harlan), and as a cafe guest in ''Eyes Wide Shut''.

Trademark characteristics

Stanley Kubrick's films have several trademark characteristics. All but his first two full-length films and ''2001'' were adapted from existing novels (''2001'' being based on ''The Sentinel'' as well as having its own planned novelization), and he occasionally wrote screenplays in collaboration with writers (usually novelists, but a journalist in the case of ''Full Metal Jacket'') who had limited screenwriting experience. Many of his films had voice-over narration, sometimes taken verbatim from the novel. With or without narration, all of his films contain extensive character's-point-of-view footage. The closing of films with "The End" went out of style in the wake of the advent of long closing credits in the 1970s. (Disney films, for example, stopped using "The End" in 1984). However, Kubrick continued to put it at the end of the credits in every one of his films, long after the rest of the film industry stopped using it. On the other hand, Kubrick occasionally dispensed with opening credits (in ''A Space Odyssey'' and ''A Clockwork Orange''), long before it became commonplace -- as had Welles in ''Citizen Kane'' and Disney in ''Fantasia'' before him and George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola would later do, most notably in ''Star Wars'' and ''Apocalypse Now''. Kubrick's credits are always a slide show. His only rolling credits are the opening credits to ''The Shining''.

Kubrick paid close attention to the releases of his films in other countries. Not only did he have complete control of the dubbing cast, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in ''The Shining'', the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in ''Eyes Wide Shut'', the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Kubrick always personally supervised the foreign voice-dubbing and the actual script translation into foreign languages for all of his films. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations have been produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are used for translation.

Beginning with ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', all of his films except ''Full Metal Jacket'' used mostly pre-recorded classical music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos. He also often used merry-sounding pop music in an ironic way during scenes depicting devastation and destruction, especially in the closing credits or end sequences of a film.

In his review of ''Full Metal Jacket'', Roger Ebert noted that many Kubrick films have a facial closeup of an unraveling character in which the character's head is tilted down and his eyes are tilted up, although Ebert does not think there is any deep meaning to these shots. Lobrutto's biography of Kubrick notes that his director of photography, Doug Milsome, coined the phrase the "Kubrick crazy stare". The connection of this stare with psychoanalysis is often made through the concept of "The Gaze" and its implications in visual culture. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls.

Critic and Kubrick biographer Alexander Walker has noted Kubrick's repeated "corridor" compositions, of which two particularly well-known ones are the StarGate sequence in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and the extensive use of the hotel corridors in ''The Shining''.

Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (The more frequently cited example of this in ''2001'' is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, rather than David Bowman's exploration [while still wearing his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the StarGate.)

Stanley Kubrick was a passionate chess-player, often playing on the set of his films. Chess appears as a motif or a plot-device in three of his films, ''The Killing'', ''Lolita'', and ''2001: A Space Odyssey''. Mario Falsetto believes that the marble floor in the room of the prisoner's trial in ''Paths of Glory'' is deliberately chosen to represent a chess-board, with prisoners as "pawns in the game".

Many of Kubrick's films have back-references to previous Kubrick films. The best-known examples of this are the appearance of the soundtrack album for ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' appearing in the record store in ''A Clockwork Orange'' and Quilty's joke about Spartacus in ''Lolita''. Less obvious is the reference to a painter named Ludovico in ''Barry Lyndon'', Ludovico being the name of the conditioning treatment in ''A Clockwork Orange''.

CRM-114

Although ''Dr. Strangelove'' employs a device called ''CRM-114'', and ''A Clockwork Orange'' has a sound-alike medicine called ''Serum 114'', numerous and oft-repeated claims that the numbers 114 appear in other Kubrick films are apocryphal. ''CRM-114'' is also used in the source novel ''Red Alert'', upon which ''Dr. Strangelove'' is based, although claims have been made that the acronym appears in Kubrick's earlier film ''The Killing''. Nonetheless, in a remarkable case of a director's influence over popular culture through an exaggerated urban legend, there is in honor of this Kubrick trademark, an e-mail spam filtering system, a progressive rock band, a right-wing website, a sound amplifier in the film ''Back to the Future'', a catalog code in the TV series ''Heroes'', and a weapon in the TV series ''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'', all named ''CRM-114'', as well as a short film called ''Serum 114''. The ''Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'' episode, "Business as Usual", had as guest star actor Steven Berkoff from ''A Clockwork Orange'' and ''Barry Lyndon'', and it was directed by regular cast member Alexander Siddig, who is a nephew of ''A Clockwork Orange'' star Malcolm McDowell.

Aspect ratio

There has been a longstanding debate regarding the DVD releases of Kubrick's films, specifically regarding the aspect ratio of many of the films. The primary point of contention relates to his final five films: ''A Clockwork Orange'', ''Barry Lyndon'', ''The Shining'', ''Full Metal Jacket'', and ''Eyes Wide Shut''.

Kubrick's initial involvement with home video mastering of his films was a result of television screenings of ''2001: A Space Odyssey''. Because the film was shot in 65 mm, the composition of each shot was compromised by the pan-and-scan method of transferring a wide-screen image to fit a 1.33:1 television set.

Kubrick's final five films were shot "flat"—the full 1.37:1 area is exposed in the camera, but with appropriate markings on the viewfinder, the picture was composed for and cropped to the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in a theater's projector.

The first mastering of these five films was in 2000 as part of the "Stanley Kubrick Collection", consisting of ''Lolita'', ''Dr. Strangelove'' (in association with Sony Pictures), ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', ''A Clockwork Orange'', ''Barry Lyndon'', ''The Shining'', ''Full Metal Jacket'', and ''Eyes Wide Shut''. Kubrick oversaw the video masters in 1989 for Warner Home Video, and approved of 1.33:1 transfers for all of the films except for ''2001'', which was letterboxed.

Kubrick never approved a 1.85:1 video transfer of any of his films; when he died in 1999, DVDs and the 16:9 format were only beginning to become popular in the US. Most people were accustomed to seeing movies fill their television screen. Warner Home Video chose to release these films with the transfers that Kubrick had explicitly approved.

In 2007, Warner Home Video remastered ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', ''A Clockwork Orange'', ''The Shining'', ''Full Metal Jacket'', and ''Eyes Wide Shut'' in High-Definition, releasing the titles on DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc. All were released as 16:9 transfers, preserving the theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratios for all of the flat films except ''A Clockwork Orange'', which was transferred at the aspect ratio of 1.66:1.

In regards to the Warner Bros. titles, there is little studio documentation that is public about them other than instructions given to projectionists on initial release; however, Kubrick's storyboards for ''The Shining'' do prove that he composed the film for wide-screen. In instructions given to photographer John Alcott in one panel, Kubrick writes: ''THE FRAME IS EXACTLY 1.85–1. Obviously you compose for that but protect the full 1.33–1 area.''

More confusion results regarding Kubrick's non-Warner distributed titles. During the days of laserdisc, The Criterion Collection released six Kubrick films. ''Spartacus'' and ''2001'' were both native 70 mm releases (exhibited in their roadshow engagements at a ratio of 2.20:1) at the same ratio as their subsequent DVD releases, and ''The Killing'' and ''Paths of Glory'' were both transferred at 1.33:1, despite the latter being hard matted extensively. Both pictures were theatrically projected at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

''Dr. Strangelove'' and ''Lolita'' were also transferred at 1.33:1, although ''Strangelove'' exhibits a number of hard mattes at a ratio of 1.66:1 in second-unit footage. This is sometimes falsely attributed to the use of stock footage in ''Strangelove''. Both films were presented theatrically at ratios of 1.85:1.

The DVD versions of ''The Killing'' and ''Paths of Glory'' released by MGM Home Entertainment retained the same 1.33:1 aspect ratio as the laserdisc versions, while the Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray editions of the two films feature a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The initial DVD releases of ''Strangelove'' maintained the 1.33:1, Kubrick-approved transfer, but for the most recent DVD and Blu-ray editions, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment replaced it with a new, digitally remastered anamorphic transfer with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. All DVD and Blu-ray releases of ''Lolita'' to date have been at a uniform 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The Blu-ray edition of ''Barry Lyndon'' presents the film in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

Laserdisc releases of ''2001'' were presented in a slightly different aspect ratio than the original film. The film was shot in 65 mm, which has a ratio of 2.20:1, but many theaters could only show it in 35 mm reduction prints, which were presented at a ratio of 2.35:1. Thus, the picture was slightly modified for the 35 mm prints. The laserdisc releases maintained the 2.20:1 ratio, but the source material was an already cropped 35 mm print; thus, the edges were slightly cropped and the top and bottom of the image slightly opened up. This seems to have been corrected with the most recent DVD release, which was newly remastered from a 70 mm print.

Personal life and beliefs

Alternative adaptations

Three of Stanley Kubrick's films have had their source material re-adapted in some fashion: Anthony Burgess's stage adaptation of ''A Clockwork Orange'' in 1990, which he hoped would be considered a more definitive adaptation than Kubrick's film; the Stephen King written and produced television miniseries of ''The Shining'', which King hoped would stand as the authorized adaptation; and Adrian Lyne's adaptation of ''Lolita'', which had the blessing of Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri (who echoed his father's moderate misgivings about Kubrick's version). Both Burgess and King overtly stated that they were annoyed by Kubrick's denying their lead characters (Alex DeLarge and Jack Torrance, respectively) a final redemption that was present in the source material, but absent from Kubrick's adaptation.

Influences

Alexander Walker in his book ''Stanley Kubrick Directs'' notes that Kubrick often mentioned Max Ophuls as an influence on his moving camera, especially the tracking shots in ''Paths of Glory''. Geoffrey Cocks sees the influence of Ophuls as going beyond this to include a sensibility drawn to stories of thwarted love and a preoccupation with predatory men. Kubrick once named Ophul’s ''Le Plaisir'' his favorite film. A very young Jean-Luc-Godard in a (pejorative) review of ''The Killing'' also noted the influence of Ophuls on Kubrick's camera movements.

Critic Robert Kolker sees evident influence of Welles on the same moving camera shots, while biographer Vincent LeBrutto states that Kubrick consciously identified with Welles. LeBrutto sees much influence of Welles' style on Kubrick's ''The Killing'', "the multiple points of view, extreme angles, and deep focus" and on the style of the closing credits of ''Paths of Glory'', and Quentin Curtis in ''The Daily Telegraph'' describes Welles as "[Kubrick's] great influence, in composition and camera movement." One particular film of John Huston, ''The Asphalt Jungle'', sufficiently impressed Kubrick as to persuade him he wanted to cast Sterling Hayden in his first major feature ''The Killing''.

Walker states that Kubrick never acknowledged Fritz Lang as an influence on him, but holds that Lang's interests are analogous to Kubrick's with regard to an interest in myth and "the Teutonic unconscious". Michael Herr's memoir ''Kubrick'' states that Kubrick was deeply inspired by G. W. Pabst. In particular Pabst had for several decades also considered adapting Schnitzler's ''Traumnovelle'', the basis of ''Eyes Wide Shut'', although Pabst had been unable to come up with a suitable approach

As a young man, Kubrick also was fascinated by the films of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Kubrick also as a young man read Pudovkin’s seminal theoretical work, ''Film Technique'' which argues that editing makes film a unique art form, which needs to be effectively employed to manipulate the medium to its fullest. Kubrick recommended this work to others for years to come. Thomas Nelson describes this book as "the greatest influence of any single written work on the evolution of [Kubrick's] private aesthetics".

Russian documentary film maker Pavel Klushantsev made a groundbreaking film in the 1950s entitled ''Road to the Stars'', which is believed to have significantly influenced Kubrick's technique in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', particularly with regard to its accurate depiction of weightlessness and rotating space station. Indeed ''Encyclopedia Astronautica'' describes some scenes from ''2001'' as a "shot-for-shot duplication of ''Road to the Stars''". Specific comparisons of shots from the two films have been analyzed by filmmaker Alessandro Cima. A 1994 issue of ''American Cinimatographer'' states "When Stanley Kubrick made 2002: a Space Odyssey in 1968, he claimed to have been first to fly actor/astronauts on wires with the camera on the ground, shooting vertically while the actor's body covered the wires" but observes that Klushantsev had actually preceded him in this.

Kubrick was also a great admirer of the films of Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, Jean Renoir, and Federico Fellini, but the degree of their influence on his own style has not been assessed. In an early interview with Horizon magazine in the late 1950s, Kubrick stated, "I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them."

Late in life, Kubrick became enamored with the works of David Lynch, being particularly fascinated by Lynch's first major film ''Eraserhead'', which he asked cast members of ''The Shining'' to watch to establish the mood he wanted to convey.

Legacy

Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life. His oeuvre was comparatively low in number (compared to contemporaries such as Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini) due to his methodical and meticulous dedication to every aspect of film production. A number of his films are recognized as seminal classics within their genre.

Awards and recognition

All Kubrick films from ''Paths of Glory'' to the end of his career were nominated for at least one Golden Globe or Oscar (along with several BAFTA nominations) with the notable exception of ''The Shining'' which is not only the least honored of Kubrick's films since 1956's ''The Killing'', but was actually nominated for the infamous Razzie award. (However, this was the first year of the Razzies which at that time was run out of one person's home and was voted on by less than 10 people, rather than the large international committee that votes on it today.) Ironically, at least two published books, ''The Wolf at the Door'' by Jay Cocks and ''Kubrick, inside a film artist's maze'' by Thomas Nelson, consider ''The Shining'' to be a kind of master key to Kubrick's whole body of work in which all of Kubrick's philosophical preoccupations merge into a grand synthesis.

Six of Stanley Kubrick's films were nominated for Academy Awards in various categories, including acting Oscars for ''Spartacus''. ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' received numerous technical awards, including a BAFTA award for cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and an Academy Award for best visual effects, which Kubrick (as director of special effects on the film) received. This was Kubrick's only personal Oscar win among 13 nominations.

Most awards for which Kubrick's films were nominated tended to be in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and music. For these, see articles on the individual films. However, only four of his films were nominated for their acting performances, notably ''Lolita'', getting three acting nominations from the Golden Globes, and Peter Sellers getting nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA for his triple roles in ''Dr. Strangelove''. Of all his movies, only ''Spartacus'' rewarded a cast member with an acting award, Peter Ustinov for Best Supporting Actor.

This list includes a list of awards for which Kubrick himself was personally nominated or won in the area of Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the notorious Raspberry.

''The Killing (film) ''The Shining (film)

Year !! Title !! Awards (limited to Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Razzies)
1953	''Fear and Desire''
1955	''Killer's Kiss''
1956	The Killing'' ||rowspan=2|Nominated for BAFTA Award: Best Film from Any Source
1957	''Paths of Glory''
1960	Spartacus (1960 film)>Spartacus''
1962	Lolita (1962 film)>Lolita''
1964	''Dr. Strangelove''
1968	2001: A Space Odyssey (film)>2001: A Space Odyssey''
1971	A Clockwork Orange (film)>A Clockwork Orange''
1975	''Barry Lyndon''
1980	The Shining'' || Nominated for Razzie: Worst DirectorNominated for Saturn: Best Direction
1987	''Full Metal Jacket''
1999	''Eyes Wide Shut''

For many individual films Kubrick was nominated for and won awards from various societies of film critics, film festivals, and both the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America.

Kubrick's lifetime achievement awards were the D.W. Griffith award from the Directors Guild of America, and another from the Director's Guild of Great Britain, and the ''Career Golden Lion'' from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.

In the science fiction world, Kubrick has thrice won the especially coveted Hugo Award, a prize mainly for print writing and only secondarily for drama production. He also received four nominations (with one win) of the science-fiction-film-oriented Saturn awards from the Academy of Science Fiction for ''The Shining'', an award that did not exist when Kubrick won his three Hugos.

Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival in 1959 for ''Killer's Kiss'' and "Filmcritica ''Bastone Bianco'' Award" at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 for ''Eyes Wide Shut''. He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for ''Lolita''. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997 and the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.

In 1997, three of Kubrick's films were selected by the American Film Institute for their list of the 100 Greatest Movies in America: ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' at #22, ''Dr. Strangelove'' at No.26 and ''A Clockwork Orange'' at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated their list with ''2001'' ranked at #15, ''Dr. Strangelove'' ranked at No.39 and ''Clockwork Orange'' ranked at #70; ''Spartacus'' was one of the new selections, ranking at #81.

In 2000, BAFTA renamed their Britannia award to the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award. Kubrick is among filmmakers such as Griffith, Olivier (whom Kubrick directed him in ''Spartacus''), Cecil B. DeMille, and Irving Thalberg, all of whom have had annual awards named after them. Kubrick won this award in 1999, one year prior to its being renamed in his honor.

Reviews from critics

Many of Kubrick's films initially received lukewarm reviews, only to be hailed as major and seminal classics decades later. Film critic Andrew Sarris was consistently highly dismissive of Kubrick, often considering him as impersonal and misanthropic. In his 1968 book, ''The American Cinema'', Sarris said Kubrick had "a naive faith in the power of images to transcend fuzzy feelings and vague ideas". Pauline Kael was more positive towards Kubrick's earlier work (giving one of the most glowing reviews of anyone of ''Lolita''), but shared Sarris' view of his latter films. She derided ''A Clockwork Orange'' as being exploitative and as inverting Burgess' meaning", and criticized ''The Shining'' for being a cheat with "static dialogues" lacking the " scary fun or mysterious beauty" of other horror films, but instead being obsessed with metaphysical issues that she felt bogged the film down. Long after she retired she publicly denounced Kubrick's final film ''Eyes Wide Shut'' as utterly ludicrous, although in the same interview she defended Kubrick's ''Lolita'' as far better than the 1998 remake.

Dublin-based film critic Paul Lynch both commends the arresting power of Kubrick's images while concerned that Kubrick has an unfeeling ivory-tower approach to life. In the same essay, he wrote both while also saying Acknowledging Andrew Sarris' above-quoted dismissal of Kubrick's over-reliance on images, Lynch acknowledges that the images indeed are, profoundly potent.

''Film Threat'''s Tim Merrill is more generous stating This is from a review of the Spielberg-completed Kubrick project ''A.I.''}}

Writer Mark Browning has noted that critics seem divided between those that consider him "immensely profound" or "just plain pretentious." Likewise, Tony Mills in the Sunday Times Book review said he is "depending on who you ask either the greatest film director since Orson Welles or...a hypnotically pretentious fake". Initially, Roger Ebert gave a poor review of ''The Shining'' which now Ebert has canonized in his series of reviews of great films. It has been argued that this frequent shift in opinion is due to the consistently idiosyncratic and unconventional character of his film-making style, and this also accounts for his enormous influence on the film community. (See section ''Opinions of filmmakers'' below.) Ronnie Lankford notes "It is fascinating, when reflecting upon Kubrick, how many times he made a seminal film." which approached subjects in a new way. In the same essay he writes,

...critical opinion has always lagged behind when it came to Kubrick. Look up ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968) in the average movie guide. Most call it an innovative masterpiece and forget to mention that a number of critics hated the film when it was released. Kubrick’s films have often been groundbreaking, controversial, and misunderstood. But critics who dare to question his artistry usually have to eat their review.

As for Kubrick's own opinion of the critics, he once said: "I find a lot of critics misunderstand my films; probably everybody's films. Very few of them spend enough time thinking about them. They look at the film once, they don't really remember what they saw, and they write the review in an hour. I mean, one spent more time on a book report in school."

Style

''See also Trademark characteristics above''

For Kubrick, written dialogue is one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film acting, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often re-direct a film.

As he explained to a journalist,

Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing; acting comes from the theatre; and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as ''Spartacus'' (when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless exploratory re-shooting of scenes that was an exhaustive investigation of all possible variations of a scene.This enabled him to walk into the editing room with copious options. John Baxter has written:

Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months... he arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing.

Kubrick also pioneered the use of long takes extended over the course of a picture, such as the extended tricycle riding sequence in ''The Shining'' or the long pullback from Alex's face at the beginning of ''A Clockwork Orange''. While not an unknown technique before Kubrick, it became seen in the film community as a Kubrickian trademark.

Kubrick pioneered the use of music as a "black joke" to achieve a chilling, ironic effect (one now often employed by Quentin Tarantino) by incongruously combining mismatched moods and styles. Igor Stravinsky was arguably the innovator of this musical technique during his Neo-Classic period (1920s to the 1950s), but it was Kubrick who extended this idea to the big screen. This gives the intended emotional impact of a scene even more power. Brief examples of this include Vera Lynn singing We'll Meet Again in the final scene of ''Dr. Strangelove'' (during a nuclear holocaust), using some older classical music for the futuristic ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', and using Gene Kelly's version of ''Singin’ in the Rain'' for the end credits in the dystopian world of ''A Clockwork Orange'', and light pop music in ''Full Metal Jacket''. The music for ''Barry Lyndon'' is a notable exception to this rule, however, as classical music dominates the 18th century setting it is placed in.

In a book-length study of how Kubrick adapts novels to the screen, writer Greg Jenkins derives the following generalizations about Kubrick's screenplays:

1. Regardless of how a novel may begin, Kubrick launches his adaptation of it with a heavily visual sequence that immediately and purposefully seizes our attention. 2. Where it suits his purpose, Kubrick expunges parts of the original, including some characters, episodes, and swatches of dialogue. 3. Addressing himself to the portion of the narrative that remains, Kubrick distorts, reorders, and conflates many of its components. 4. Although skilled with words, Kubrick is equally skilled with and devoted to images, and he tells his stories as visually as possible. 5. In general, Kubrick lowers the amount and intensity of violence found in the original. 6. As Kubrick remakes the original narrative, he tends, with some exceptions, to simplify it. 7. Kubrick makes his heroes more virtuous than the novels' and his villains more wicked. 8. Predominately, Kubrick imbues his films with a morality that is more conventional than the novels'. 9. Kubrick's films are more obviously laced with moments of moderate-to-high drama than are the source materials. 10. From time to time, though it countervails his mainly reductive thrust, Kubrick expands one or more aspects of the original narrative. 11. Now and then, Kubrick invents his own material outright, and imposes it on the new narrative.

Opinions of filmmakers

Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Joel & Ethan Coen, Ridley Scott, David Lynch and George A. Romero have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of ''Eyes Wide Shut'', Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's ''Kubrick'', film director Martin Scorsese has noted that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films.

Even today, Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, and Gaspar Noé. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's ''Barton Fink'', in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to ''The Shining''. The story telling style of their ''Hudsucker Proxy'' was influenced by ''Doctor Strangelove''. Director Tim Burton has included a few visual homages to Kubrick in his work, notably using actual footage from ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' in ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'', and modeling the look of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in his version of ''Alice in Wonderland'' on the Grady girls in ''The Shining''. Film critic Roger Ebert also noted that Burton's ''Mars Attacks!'' was partially inspired by ''Dr. Strangelove''. Burton's only music video, that of The Killers' ''Bones'' (2006), includes clips from Kubrick's ''Lolita'', as well as other films from the general era.

In particular, Paul Thomas Anderson (who was fond of Kubrick as a teenager) in an interview with ''Entertainment Weekly'', stated "it's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with." Reviewer William Arnold described Anderson's ''There Will Be Blood'' as being stylistically an homage to Kubrick "particularly "2001: A Space Odyssey" – opening with a similar prologue that jumps in stages over the years and using a soundtrack throughout that employs anachronistic music."

Although Michael Moore specializes in documentary film-making, at the beginning of shooting his only non-documentary feature film ''Canadian Bacon'', he sat his cast and crew down to watch Stanley Kubrick's ''Dr. Strangelove''. He told them "What this movie was in the '60s, is what we should aspire to with this film." Moore had previously written Kubrick a letter telling him how much ''Bacon'' was inspired by ''Strangelove''.

Film director Frank Darabont has been inspired by Kubrick's use of music. In an interview with ''The Telegraph'' he states that ''2001'' took "the use of music in film" to absolute perfection, and one shot employing clasical music in ''The Shawshank Redemption'' follows Kubrick's lead. On the other hand, while Darabont has followed Kubrick in directing two Stephen King adaptions, Darabont shares Stephen King's negative view of Kubrick's adaption of ''The Shining''. In the same interview, Darabont said Darabont also echoes these criticisms in }}

Many more directors have simply cited Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films such as Richard Linklater, Sam Mendes, Joel Schumacher, Taylor Hackford. and Darren Aronofsky.

Occasionally, critics may detect a Kubrickian influence when the actual filmmaker acknowledges none. Critics have noticed the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Danish independent director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jim Pappas suggests this comes from his employment of Kubrick's cinematographer for ''The Shining'' and ''Barry Lyndon'' in his film ''Fear X'', suggesting " it is the Kubrick influence that leaves us asking ourselves what we believe we should know is true" The apparent influence of Kubrick on his film ''Bronson'' was noted by the ''Los Angeles Times'' and the French publication ''Evene'' However, when asked by ''Twitch'' about the very frequent comparisons by critics of the film ''Bronson'' to ''A Clockwork Orange'' Refn denied the influence. Refn stated

Some filmmakers have been critical of Kubrick's work such as filmmakers of the remodernist film movement, Jesse Richards described Kubrick's work as "boring and dishonest". Peter Rinaldi, in his essay on the ''Remodernist Film Manifesto'' for Mungbeing, ''The Shore as Seen from the Deep Sea'', defends the manifesto, writing:

I certainly don't share in my friend's opinion of this man's work, but I actually think this is a hugely important part of the manifesto. A lot of us came to be filmmakers because a particular director's (or a number of directors) work inspired us. A friend of mine calls these inspirational figures his "Giants", which I think is a great word for them because sometimes they are built up so much in our minds that we don't think we, or our work, can ever really reach them and theirs. I think, for the most part, the generation that I grew up in had Kubrick as their Giant. His work has a mystical "perfectionism" that is awe-inspiring at times. This perfectionism is anathema to the Remodernist mentality and for many healthy reasons, this giant (or whatever giant towers over your work) must fall in our minds. We must become the giant.

Analysts of the TV series ''The Simpsons'' argue it contains more references to many films of Stanley Kubrick than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to ''2001'', ''A Clockwork Orange'', and ''The Shining'' but also to ''Spartacus'', ''Dr. Strangelove'', ''Lolita'', and ''Full Metal Jacket''. It has been noted that while references to "fantastic fiction" in ''The Simpsons'' are copious, "there are two masters of the genre whose impact on ''The Simpsons'' supersedes that of all others: Stanley Kubrick and Edgar Allan Poe." Similarly, it has been observed that

In January 2001, Kubrick's stepdaughter, Katharina, posted on alt.movies.kubrick that when the Director's Guild of Great Britain gave Kubrick a lifetime achievement award, among the many clips of Kubrick's films they included a cut together sequence of all the Simpsons homage's to his films to that date.

Homages

In 2009 there was an exhibition of paintings and photos inspired by Kubrick's films in Dublin, Ireland, entitled 'Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light'. Curated by Irish film critic John Maguire, the exhibition featured 25 new works from Irish and international painters, photographers and illustrators. It was displayed at the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin from October 1 to 31.

In 2010, painter Carlos Ramos held an exhibition entitled "Kubrick" at the Copro gallery in Los Angeles. It featured paintings in a variety of styles based on scenes from Stanley Kubrick films.

In October 2009, online toymaker "quartertofour" released a version of Rubik's Cube with prints of photos from six of Kubrick's films on the side of the cube. (This is not to be confused with the online game Kubrick with computer images of Rubik's Cube which has no connection with Stanley Kubrick.)

The video for Pop singer Lady Gaga's song ''Bad Romance'' was found by Daniel Kreps of ''Rolling Stone'' magazine to be heavily influenced by the film-making style of Kubrick. Lady Gaga has also introduced a few concerts with a hip-hop styled remix of the electronic version of Purcell's ''Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary'' that opens the film ''Clockwork Orange'' which also is used in her mini-movie ''The Fame.'' Finally, her song ''Dance in the Dark'' has the lines "Find your Jesus, Find your Kubrick".

Studies of Kubrick

At least two full-length books on Stanley Kubrick are devoted to frame-by-frame analysis of his visual style: ''Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis'' by Alexander Walker, and ''Stanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999 (Basic Film)'' by Paul Duncan. History professor Geoffrey Cocks notes that Kubrick has what he calls an "open narrative" style that "requires the audience to derive meaning actively rather than being passively instructed, entertained, and manipulated." On the other hand, Cocks believes that Kubrick's preoccupation with sweeping overarching historical themes causes him to frequently sacrifice character development. "His films consistently display a basic taxonomy of violence, systems of control, and inherent human evil. This idée fixe freezes the people in his films into types rather than fully developed characters."

Social commentary and vision

Kubrick has been noted both for his social commentary and for his distinctive visual style. Regarding social commentary, Kubrick has been noted for the recurring theme of concern with the over-mechanization of society which, in its attempt to create a safe environment, creates an artificial sterility that breeds the very evils it tries to exclude. Multiple critics have noted that Kubrick's earlier films have more straightforward linear narrative while the later films are moderately and subtly surreal reflecting a sense of social dislocation and confusion The emotional distance Kubrick maintains from many of his characters have caused critics to see Kubrick as a cold and detached rationalist, while the recurrence of strongly psychopathic characters from Alex DeLarge to Jack Torrance in his films have caused many to view Kubrick's outlook as deeply pessimistic. In his book ''Nihilism in Film and Television'', Kevin L. Stoehr writes "If there is one film director whose movies express consistently, in terms of both form and content, the pervasive dangers and creative opportunities of nihilism in contemporary culture, that filmmaker is the late Stanley Kubrick". A frequently recurring observation on the Kubrick film that Spielberg completed ''A.I'' is that it uneasily meshes Spielberg's rosy optimistic outlook with Kubrick's pessimistic one, although one reviewer wrote “Spielberg, has done a remarkable job in balancing Kubrick's pessimism with his optimism without having one overcrowd the other”

In spite of Kubrick's own denial that he is a pessimist, the charge is frequently repeated. Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick notably the one in ''The New York Times'' by Stephen Holden (as well as that in the ''San Jose Mercury''), the entry on Kubrick in the online edition of ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', and Vincent LoBrutto's full-length biography of Kubrick (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. (Holden wrote “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.”) So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too – like an ugly insect trapped in amber – are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people – and particularly women – as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in ''The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick'', one of which characterizes ''Eyes Wide Shut'' as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”

Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find ''Eyes'' to be very optimistic. James Naremore in ''On Kubrick'' characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of ''2001'' argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous ''Doctor Strangelove''.

Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of ''The Kubrick Site'' note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.

A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is author Julian Rice, a scholar of Native American literature. His book ''Kubrick's Hope'' argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.

Spielberg, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said that

He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy.

Perhaps the last word in this debate might be Kubrick's own from a 1968 interview in Playboy

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Filmography

Documentary short films

;As director, writer, cinematographer, and sound ''Day of the Fight'' (1951, RKO Radio Pictures)(also producer and uncredited editor) ''Flying Padre'' (1951, RKO Radio Pictures)(also writer) ''The Seafarers'' (1953, Seafarers International Pictures)(also editor)

''Day of the Fight'' was part of RKO-Pathé's "This Is America" series. ''The Flying Padre'' was an RKO-Pathe Screenliner. ''The Seafarers'' is Kubrick's only color film prior to ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.

Feature films

! Year	! Film	! Director	! Producer	! Writer	! Editor	! Cinematographer
1953	''Fear and Desire''
1955	''Killer's Kiss''
1956	''The Killing''
1957	''Paths of Glory''					1
1960
1962				1
1964	''Dr. Strangelove''
1968	''2001: A Space Odyssey''
1971
1975	''Barry Lyndon''
1980
1987	''Full Metal Jacket''
1999	''Eyes Wide Shut''					1

¹ Uncredited

Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the underlying concept of Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.: Artificial Intelligence'' which was produced after his death, by his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan. Kubrick is thanked in the credits, but is not credited as writer. A new screenplay was produced from scratch around Kubrick's storyline, in turn based on a short story by Brian Aldiss.

See also

Stanley Kubrick Archive

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures

List of famous amateur chess players

Notes

References

(Storyboard for ''The Shining'', Castle, Alison (editor) and Kubrick, Stanley (photographs)) Reprinted in: Philips 2001; extract in The ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK FAQ

Further reading

Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift or a curse?’’ New York : Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 978-1-59454-387-6

Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr. 14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 978-3-88799-069-5 (English edition)

;Documentary

''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures''. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.

External links

Video: ''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures'' Introduction, 2.5 minutes

Video: Compilation of film clips, 8 minutes

Detailed analysis about Stanley Kubrick (French language)

Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database

Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication

The Authorized Stanley Kubrick Web Site by Warner Bros.

The Kubrick Site

Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide

Kubrick on Senses of Cinema (In Depth Biography)

Multi-media Kubrick archive

The Guardian: Citizen Kubrick

List of interviews and Look photographs

List of all the published Look photographs

The Hechinger Debacle

Stanley Kubrick Interviews, by Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. Phillips

Photo gallery: Kubrick on set

Category:1928 births Category:1999 deaths Category:Academy Award winners Category:American cinematographers Category:Obscenity controversies Category:American expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:American film directors Category:American film editors Category:American film producers Category:People from Manhattan Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Romanian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Polish-Jewish descent Category:American agnostics Category:American emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:American Jews Category:American screenwriters Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Visual Effects Academy Award winners Category:Censorship in the arts Category:City College of New York alumni Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:People from the Bronx Category:Amateur chess players Category:Special effects people Category:People from New York City Category:Jewish American writers

ar:ستانلي كوبريك an:Stanley Kubrick az:Stenli Kubrik bn:স্ট্যানলি কুবরিক zh-min-nan:Stanley Kubrick be:Стэнлі Кубрык be-x-old:Стэнлі Кубрык bs:Stanley Kubrick br:Stanley Kubrick bg:Стенли Кубрик ca:Stanley Kubrick cs:Stanley Kubrick cy:Stanley Kubrick da:Stanley Kubrick de:Stanley Kubrick et:Stanley Kubrick el:Στάνλεϊ Κιούμπρικ es:Stanley Kubrick eo:Stanley Kubrick eu:Stanley Kubrick fa:استنلی کوبریک hif:Stanley Kubrick fr:Stanley Kubrick gl:Stanley Kubrick ko:스탠리 큐브릭 hr:Stanley Kubrick hy:Սթենլի Կուբրիկ io:Stanley Kubrick id:Stanley Kubrick is:Stanley Kubrick it:Stanley Kubrick he:סטנלי קובריק ka:სტენლი კუბრიკი sw:Stanley Kubrick la:Stanley Kubrick lv:Stenlijs Kubriks lb:Stanley Kubrick lt:Stanley Kubrick li:Stanley Kubrick hu:Stanley Kubrick mk:Стенли Кјубрик ml:സ്റ്റാൻലി കുബ്രിക്ക് mr:स्टॅन्ली कुब्रिक arz:ستانلى كوبريك nl:Stanley Kubrick ja:スタンリー・キューブリック no:Stanley Kubrick nn:Stanley Kubrick oc:Stanley Kubrick pnb:سٹینلے کوبرک pms:Stanley Kubrick pl:Stanley Kubrick pnt:Στάνλεϊ Κιούμπρικ pt:Stanley Kubrick ro:Stanley Kubrick qu:Stanley Kubrick rue:Стенлі Кубрік ru:Кубрик, Стэнли sc:Stanley Kubrick sq:Stanley Kubrick scn:Stanley Kubrick simple:Stanley Kubrick sk:Stanley Kubrick sl:Stanley Kubrick sr:Стенли Кјубрик sh:Stanley Kubrick fi:Stanley Kubrick sv:Stanley Kubrick tl:Stanley Kubrick ta:இஸ்டான்லி குப்ரிக்கு th:สแตนลีย์ คูบริก tg:Станлий Кубрик tr:Stanley Kubrick uk:Стенлі Кубрик vec:Stanley Kubrick vi:Stanley Kubrick vo:Stanley Kubrick war:Stanley Kubrick bat-smg:Stanley Kubrick zh:斯坦利·库布里克

Coordinates	37°46′45.48″N122°25′9.12″N
name	Christiane Kubrick
birthname	Christiane Susanne Harlan
birth date	May 10, 1932
birth place	Braunschweig, Germany
spouse	Werner Bruhns (1952-1957) Stanley Kubrick (1958-1999) }}

Christiane Kubrick (née Harlan) (born May 10, 1932) is a German actress, dancer, painter and singer. She was born into a theatrical family, and was the wife of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick from 1958 until his death in 1999.

Biography

Christiane Susanne Harlan was born in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony in 1932, the daughter of two opera singers Fritz Moritz Harlan and his wife Ingeborg (née de Freitas). She was trained as an actress but became better known as an artist. Success in her earlier career as an actress led to her being cast in the film ''Paths of Glory'' by Stanley Kubrick, credited as Susanne Christian.

In the final scene of ''Paths of Glory'', the young woman she plays is forced to sing to a rowdy, disillusioned tavern-full of French soldiers. Her rendition of the German folk song (in German) ''Ein treuer Husar'' (''The Faithful Hussar'') slowly wins the hearts of the men who stop their shameless carousing and one-by-one, begin to hum and sing along, many of them shedding tears of sadness and remorse.

She and Kubrick married in 1958 shortly after filming was completed; their marriage lasted until Kubrick's death in 1999 and they produced two daughters, Anya and Vivian. Her eldest daughter, Katherina, was the only child of her first marriage to Werner Bruhns, which ended in 1957. Anya died in 2009 from cancer.

The Kubrick family moved to England in the early 1960s where Christiane continued to paint and exhibit. She became highly accomplished and avidly collected artist with a passion for floral settings and still lifes. Her works were featured in two Stanley Kubrick films. In ''A Clockwork Orange'', a large floral oil painting adorns the living room of "Home", the abode of reclusive writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee) and his wife (Adrienne Corri) during the famous "''Singin' in the Rain''" scene. In ''Eyes Wide Shut'', Christiane's vivid paintings adorn nearly every wall of Dr. and Mrs. Hartford's (Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman) NY city apartment. A few paintings by her daughter Katherina are also shown. Her paintings are also featured in various rooms of Ziegler's (Sydney Pollack) NYC mansion (billiard room and upstairs bathroom).

Her brother Jan Harlan was executive producer for all of Stanley Kubrick's films from ''Barry Lyndon'' (1975) onwards, as well as director of the documentary ''Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures,'' in which she took full part, following Kubrick's death.

Christiane continues to live in England, where she and her daughter Katharina hold regular painting courses at their home in Hertfordshire.

She and her brother Jan Harlan are very active in preservation, exhibit production and publishing related to her husband's life work, including the Taschen mega-book ''The Stanley Kubrick Archives'' and the touring major museum exhibit.

In March 2001, Christiane travelled to the Vatican in Rome to screen a newly remastered version of her late husband's 1968 film, ''2001: A Space Odyssey''. The film was shown at the Vatican on Thursday evening, March 1 under the aegis of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. In 1996, that Council listed the original Kubrick film among the most important films of the 20th century. The Vatican screening was also attended by Archbishop John Foley, the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Relatives

Christiane Kubrick is a niece of the controversial German filmmaker Veit Harlan (''Jud Süß''). Stanley Kubrick considered making a film about Harlan.

References

External links

Official Website

Guardian video interview with Christiane Kubrick

Category:1932 births Category:German actors Category:German emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:German painters Category:German female singers Category:German women artists Category:Living people Category:People from Braunschweig Category:Women painters

de:Christiane Kubrick fr:Christiane Kubrick it:Christiane Kubrick pl:Christiane Kubrick ru:Кубрик, Кристиана

Coordinates	37°46′45.48″N122°25′9.12″N
honorific-prefix	The Right Honourable
name	The Lord Archerof Weston-super-Mare
constituency mp	Louth (Lincolnshire)
term start	8 December 1969
term end	10 October 1974
predecessor	Cyril Osborne
successor	Michael Brotherton
birth date	April 15, 1940
birth place	London
nationality	British
party	Conservative Party
spouse	Mary Doreen Weeden
children	The Hon. William Harold (b.1972) and The Hon. James Howard Archer (b.1974)
occupation	Politician, author
religion	Church of England
website	www.jeffreyarcher.co.uk
footnotes	}}

{{infobox writer | name	Jeffrey Archer | image | imagesize | caption | birth_date | pseudonym | occupation Novelist, short story writer, playwright | period 1976–present | genre Thriller, drama | subject | movement | influences | influenced | signature
website	http://www.jeffreyarcher.co.uk/ }}

Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (born 15 April 1940) is a best-selling English author and former politician whose political career ended with his conviction and subsequent imprisonment (2001–03) for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Alongside his literary work, Archer was a Member of Parliament (1969–74), deputy chairman of the Conservative Party (1985–86) and was made a life peer in 1992.

Early life

Background

Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in the City of London Maternity Hospital. He was two weeks old when his family moved to the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, where he spent most of his early life. His father, William (died 1956), was sixty-four when Archer was born. In 1951, he won a scholarship to Wellington School, in Somerset (not to be confused with the public school Wellington College, which is possible from the ambiguous biography in Archer's earlier books). At this time his mother, Lola, contributed a column "Over the teacups" to the local press in Weston-super-Mare and wrote about the adventures of her son 'Tuppence'; this caused Archer to be the victim of bullying while at Wellington School.

After Archer left school passing O-levels in English Literature, Art, and History, he worked in a number of jobs, including training with the army and for the police. This lasted only for a few months, but he fared better as a Physical Education teacher; first at Vicar's Hill, a Prep School in Hampshire where he taught fencing amongst other sports, later at the more prestigious independent school Dover College in Kent. As a teacher he was popular with pupils and was reported by some to have had good motivational skills, helping to instil personal confidence in the less confident.

Oxford

Archer studied for three years, gaining an academic qualification in teaching awarded by the Oxford Department for Education. The course was based at Brasenose College, Oxford, although Archer was never registered as an undergraduate student of the College. There have been claims that Archer provided false evidence of his academic qualifications, for instance the apparent citing of an American institution which was actually a bodybuilding club, in gaining admission to the course. It is also alleged that he provided false statements about three non-existent A level passes and a US degree. His website includes references to his Oxford 'Principal', yet omits that he was not a full undergraduate at Oxford.

While in Oxford he was successful in athletics, competing in sprinting and hurdling. It is unclear whether he was in fact eligible to compete in Varsity matches, not being a member of the College. Television coverage survives of him making false starts in a 1964 sprint race, but despite the rules Archer was not disqualified. He gained a blue in athletics and went on to run for England once and also competed for Great Britain once and was unaccountably successful financially.

Even as a student Jeffrey Archer was plagued with rumours of financial wrongdoing - fellow undergraduates were amazed that he owned houses and cars with personalised number plates while working part time as an Oxfam fund raiser.

He raised money for the charity Oxfam, obtaining the support of The Beatles in a charity fundraising drive. The band accepted his invitation to visit the senior common room of Brasenose College, where they were photographed with Archer and dons of the college, although they did not play there. The critic Sheridan Morley, then a student at Merton, was present and recalled the occasion: }}

It was during this period that Archer met his wife, Mary Weeden, at that time studying chemistry at St Anne's College, Oxford. They married in July 1966. Mary went on to specialise in solar power.

Charity fundraising

After leaving Oxford, he continued as a charity fundraiser, working for the National Birthday Trust, a medical charity. He also began a career in politics, serving as a Conservative councillor on the Greater London Council during 1967–70.

One organisation Archer worked for, the United Nations Association, alleged discrepancies in his claims for expenses, and details appeared in the press in a scrambled form. Archer brought a defamation action against the former Conservative member of parliament Humphry Berkeley, chairman of the UNA, as the source of the allegations. The case was settled out of court after three years. Berkeley tried to persuade Conservative Central Office that Archer was unsuitable as a parliamentary candidate, but a selection meeting at Louth disregarded any doubts.

Archer set up his own fund-raising company, Arrow Enterprises, in 1969. That same year he opened an art gallery, the Archer Gallery, in Mayfair. The gallery specialised in modern art, including pieces by the acclaimed sculptor and painter Leon Underwood. The gallery ultimately lost money, however, and Archer sold it two years later.

Writing career

His first book, ''Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less'', was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen and published first in the US, then eventually in Britain in the Autumn of 1976. The book was an instant success and Archer avoided bankruptcy, never being legally declared bankrupt. A BBC Television adaptation of the book was broadcast in 1990, and a radio adaptation was aired on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1980s.

''Kane and Abel'' proved to be his best-selling work, reaching number one on the ''New York Times'' bestsellers list. It was made into a television mini-series by CBS in 1985, starring Peter Strauss and Sam Neill. The following year, Granada TV screened a ten-part adaptation of another Archer bestseller, ''First Among Equals'', which told the story of four men and their quest to become Prime Minister.

Archer states he spends considerable time writing and re-writing each book. He goes abroad to write the first draft, working in blocks of two-hours at a time, then writes anything up to seventeen further drafts. It has been suggested that his books require extensive editing by others to make them readable.

In 2011, Archer will publish the first of five books in ''The Clifton Chronicles'', which follow the life of Harry Clifton from his birth in 1920, through to the finale in 2020. ''Only Time Will Tell'' will tell the story of Harry from 1920 through to 1940 and is set to be published in the UK on May 12, 2011. In March 2011 he visited New Zealand as part of a promotional tour. His stops included an interview on Radio Live with hosts Willie Jackson and former-disgraced-MP John Tamihere.

Political career

Member of Parliament

At 29, he was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth, holding the seat for the Conservative Party in a by-election on 4 December 1969. Archer beat Ian Gow to the selection after winning over a substantial proportion of younger members at the selection meeting. The national party had concerns about Archer's selection, but these were dismissed by the local Conservative association after representatives made a journey to party headquarters to discuss the matter. Archer's campaign colour was a dayglo orange/pink with a blue arrow; the political parties in Lincolnshire had not yet abandoned local colours, which were different from the party national colours.

Louth constituency had three key areas: Louth, Cleethorpes, and Immingham. During his time as a Member of Parliament, Archer was a regular at the Immingham Conservative Club in the most working-class part of the constituency.

He took part in the "Kennedy Memorial Test" in 1970, a 50 mile running/walking race from Louth to Skegness and back. This raised funds for the building of Louth Swimming Pool, which was subsequently opened by his wife in March 1974.

In Parliament, Archer was on the left of the Conservative Party, rebelling against some of his party's policies. He urged free TV licences for the elderly and was against museum charges. Archer voted against restoring capital punishment, saying it was barbaric and obscene. In 1971, he employed David Mellor, then needing money for his bar finals, to deal with his correspondence. He tipped Mellor to reach the cabinet. In an interview Archer said, "I hope we don't return to extremes. I'm what you might call centre-right but I've always disliked the right wing as much as I've disliked the left wing."

In 1974, he was a casualty of a fraudulent investment scheme involving Aquablast, a Canadian company, a debacle which lost Archer his first fortune. Fearing imminent bankruptcy, he stood down as an MP at the October 1974 general election. By this time the Archers were living in a large five-bedroom house in The Boltons, an exclusive street in South Kensington. As a result of the Aquablast affair, they were forced to sell the house and move into more modest accommodation for a while.

Return to politics: Deputy party chairman

Archer's political career revived once he became known for his novels and as a popular speaker among the Conservative grassroots. He was made deputy chairman of the Conservative Party by Margaret Thatcher in September 1985. Norman Tebbit, party chairman, had misgivings over the appointment, as did other prominent members of the party, including William Whitelaw and Ted Heath. During his tenure as deputy chairman, Archer was responsible for a number of embarrassing moments, including his statement, made during a live radio interview, that many young, unemployed people were simply unwilling to find work. At the time of Archer's comment, unemployment in the UK stood at a record 3.4 million. Archer was later forced to apologise for the remark, suggesting that his words had been "taken out of context".

Archer resigned in October 1986 due to a scandal caused by an article in ''The News of the World'', which led on the story "Tory boss Archer pays vice-girl" and claimed Archer had paid Monica Coghlan, a prostitute, £2,000 through an intermediary at Victoria Station to go abroad.

''Daily Star'' libel case

Compounding on this story, the ''Daily Star'' alleged that Archer had paid for sex with Coghlan. Archer responded by suing the ''Daily Star''. The case came to court in July 1987. Explaining the payment to Coghlan as the action of a philanthropist rather than that of a guilty man, Archer won the case and was awarded £500,000 damages. Archer stated he would donate the money to charity. This case would ultimately result in Archer's final exit from front-line politics some years later.

The description the judge (Mr Justice Caulfield) gave of Mrs Archer in his jury instructions included: "Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?" The judge then went on to say of Jeffrey Archer, "Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?" By this time, according to the journalist Adam Raphael, Jeffrey and Mary Archer were, in fact, living largely separate lives. The editor of the ''Daily Star'', Lloyd Turner, was sacked six weeks after the trial by the paper's owner Lord Stevens of Ludgate.

Archer lost a libel case after accusations in his book ''Twist in the Tale'', portraying Major General James Oluleye to be a thief. (Oluleye is the author of ''Architecturing a Destiny'' and ''Military Leadership in Nigeria''.)

Kurdish charity and peerage

When Saddam Hussein suppressed Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Archer, with the Red Cross, set up the charity ''Simple Truth'', a fundraising campaign on behalf of the Kurds." Archer was made a life peer in 1992 as Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare, of Mark in the County of Somerset. Prime minister John Major recommended him largely because of Archer's role in aid to the Kurds. On ''Question Time'' in February 1994, Archer stated that 18 should be the age of consent for homosexuality, as opposed to 21, which it was at the time. Archer has also consistently been an opponent of a return to capital punishment.

Allegations of insider dealings

In January 1994, Mary Archer, then a director of Anglia Television, attended a directors' meeting at which an impending takeover of Anglia Television by MAI, which owned Meridian Broadcasting, was discussed. The following day, Jeffrey Archer bought 50,000 shares in Anglia Television, acting on behalf of a friend, Broosk Saib. Shortly after this, it was announced publicly that Anglia Television would be taken over by MAI. As a result the shares jumped in value, whereupon Archer sold them on behalf of his friend for a profit of £77,219. The arrangements he made with the stockbrokers meant he did not have to pay at the time of buying the shares.

An inquiry was launched by the Stock Exchange into possible insider trading. The Department of Trade and Industry, headed by Michael Heseltine, announced that Archer would not be prosecuted. Archer later claimed that he had been "exonerated", but the DTI inquiry had merely stated that there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution.

London mayoral candidacy and allegations of perjury

In 1999, Archer had been selected by the Conservative Party as candidate for the London mayoral election of 2000, when, on 21 November, the ''News of the World'' published allegations that he had committed perjury in his 1987 libel case. Archer withdrew his candidacy the following day.

The basis of the allegations originated with Ted Francis, a friend who claimed Archer owed him money, and Angela Peppiatt, Archer's former personal assistant. They stated that Archer had fabricated an alibi in the 1987 trial and were concerned that Archer was unsuitable to stand as Mayor of London. Peppiatt had kept a diary of Archer's movements, which contradicted evidence given during the 1987 trial.

After the allegations, Archer was disowned by his party. Conservative leader William Hague explained: "This is the end of politics for Jeffrey Archer. I will not tolerate such behaviour in my party." On 4 February 2000, Archer was expelled from the party for five years.

The perjury trial began on 30 May 2001, a month after Monica Coghlan's death. Archer never spoke during the trial, though his wife Mary again gave evidence as she had done during the 1987 trial. When Archer's mother died on 11 July, aged 87, he was released for the day to attend the funeral. On 19 July 2001, Archer was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice at the 1987 trial. He was sentenced to four years' imprisonment by Mr Justice Potts. Ted Francis was found not guilty of perverting the course of justice.

Jail

Archer was sent to Belmarsh Prison, a Category "A" prison, but was moved to Wayland Prison, a Category "C" prison in Norfolk on 9 August 2001. Despite automatically qualifying as a category "D" prisoner given it was a first conviction and he did not pose serious risk of harm to the public, his status as such was suspended pending a police investigation into allegations about his Kurdish charity. He was then transferred to North Sea Camp, an open prison, in October 2001. From there he was let out to work at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln, England, and was allowed occasional home visits. Media reports claimed he had been abusing this privilege by attending lunches with friends, including former Education Secretary Gillian Shephard and in September 2002 he was transferred to a Category "B" prison, Lincoln, for a month, before returning to a Category "D" prison, Hollesley Bay in Suffolk.

While in prison, he wrote the three-volume memoir ''A Prison Diary'', with volumes fashioned after Dante's ''Divine Comedy'' and named the first three prisons he was kept in. During his imprisonment, Archer was visited by a number of high-profile friends, including the actor Donald Sinden and the performer Barry Humphries.

In October 2002, Archer repaid the ''Daily Star'' the £500,000 damages he had received in 1987, as well as legal costs and interest of £1.3 million. That month, he was suspended from Marylebone Cricket Club for seven years.

On 21 July 2003, Archer was released on licence, after serving half of his sentence, from HMP Hollesley Bay, Suffolk.

Kurdish aid controversy

In July 2001, shortly after being jailed for perjury, Archer's name was again shrouded in controversy, when Scotland Yard began investigating allegations that millions of pounds had disappeared from Archer's Kurdish charity. In 1991, Archer had claimed to have raised £57,042,000.

Recent years

Many of Archer's friends remained loyal. He and Lady Archer were guests at the memorial service for Norris McWhirter at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields on Thursday 7 October 2004 where they sat in the same pew as Gregory Lauder-Frost, the former head of the Conservative Monday Club, and in front of Lady Thatcher, who embraced Lady Archer.

In 2004, the government of Equatorial Guinea alleged that Archer was one of the financiers of the failed 2004 coup d'état attempt against them, citing bank details and telephone records as evidence. In 2009, Archer said: “I am completely relaxed about it. Mr Mann [the English mercenary leader of the coup] has made clear that it’s nothing to do with me.’’ In 2011 the English mercenary Simon Mann, jailed in Equatorial Guinea for his part in leading the failed 2004 coup d'état attempt told ''The Daily Telegraph'' that his forthcoming book ''Cry Havoc'' would reveal “the financial involvement of a controversial and internationally famous member of the British House of Lords in the plot, backed up by banking records”. He claimed that documents from the bank accounts in Guernsey of two companies Mann used as vehicles for organising the coup, showed a 'J H Archer' paying $135,000 into one of the firms.

On 26 February 2006, on Andrew Marr's ''Sunday AM'' programme, Archer said he had no interest in returning to front-line politics: he would pursue his writing instead. He has confirmed this when speaking at the Emmanuel College Politics Society and the Christ's Politics Society at the University of Cambridge.

Personal life

In 1979, Archer purchased the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, a house associated with the poet Rupert Brooke. He also began to hold shepherd's pie and Krug parties for prominent people at his London apartment, which overlooks the Houses of Parliament.

While he was a witness in the Aquablast case in Toronto in 1977, Archer was accused of taking three suits from a department store, an accusation he denied for many years. However, in the late 1990s, Archer finally acknowledged that he had indeed taken the suits, although he claimed that at the time he had not realised he had left the shop. No charges were brought.

Archer in fiction

Archer was satirically portrayed as a misunderstood secret agent, saviour of Britain and mankind and "overall thoroughly good chap", by actor Damian Lewis in the BBC drama ''Jeffrey Archer: The Truth'' (2002), which received strong reviews. Script writer Guy Jenkin explained that "my Jeffrey Archer is the man who has frequently saved Britain over the last 30 years. He's beloved of all women he comes across, all men, all dogs – he's a superhero".

Archer's life was parodied in November 2004 on BBC Radio 4 on an episode of the first series of ''15 Minute Musical'' entitled "Jeffrey! The Operetta", a Gilbert and Sullivan-style spoof.

In ''There's No Place Like a Home'', a comedy play by Paul Elliot, the residents of a retirement home for actors and actresses, trying to prevent its closure, kidnap Archer to use the ransom money to keep their home open.

The satirical magazine ''Private Eye'' refers to Archer as 'Jeffrey Archole' or 'Lord Archole' and characterises him as a liar and fantasist. On occasion it has published spoofs of Archer's fiction, describing a thinly-veiled heroic version of himself called 'Jeremy Bowman'. Eye "diarist" Craig Brown mocked Mary Archer's support for him in his version of her writings: "I am the chairman of the Ethics Committee at Addenbrookes hospital, and well used to coming down hard on those who lie incompetently."

List of works

Kane and Abel series

''Shall We Tell the President?'' (1977)

''Kane and Abel'' (1980)

''The Prodigal Daughter'' (1982)

Prison diaries (non-fiction)

1. ''Hell – Belmarsh'' (2002)

2. ''Purgatory – Wayland'' (2003)

3. ''Heaven – North Sea Camp'' (2004)

Other novels

''Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less'' (1976)

''First Among Equals'' (1984)

''A Matter of Honour'' (1986)

''As the Crow Flies'' (1991)

''Honour Among Thieves'' (1993)

''The Fourth Estate'' (1996)

''The Eleventh Commandment'' (1998)

''Sons of Fortune'' (2002)

''False Impression'' (2005)

''The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot With Francis J. Moloney'' (2007)

''A Prisoner of Birth'' (2008)

''Paths of Glory'' (2009)

''Only Time Will Tell'' (2011)

Plays

''Beyond Reasonable Doubt'' (1987)

''Exclusive'' (1989)

''The Accused'' (2000)

Short stories/Collections

''A Quiver Full of Arrows'' (1980)

''A Twist in the Tale'' (1989)

''Fools, Knaves, and Heroes: Great Political Short Stories Editor, Introduction. (1991)

''Twelve Red Herrings'' (1994)

''The Collected Short Stories'' (1997)

''To Cut a Long Story Short'' (2000)

''Cat O'Nine Tales'' (2006)

''And Thereby Hangs a Tale'' (2010)

For children

''The First Miracle'' (1980)

''By Royal Appointment'' (1980)

''Willy Visits the Square World'' (1980)

''Willy and the Killer Kipper'' (1981)

Clifton Chronicles

''Only Time Will Tell'' (2011)

References

Further reading

See also

Jonathan Aitken

External links

Official website

In Depth: Archer Trial at BBC News

Curtis Brown Literary Agency

Interviews

Interview about becoming Mayor of London at BBC News

Interview with Jeffrey Archer on Veronika Asks

Writing tips from Jeffrey Archer

Interview of Jeffrey Archer in the Hindu

Category:1940 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Brasenose College, Oxford Category:British politicians convicted of crimes Category:Conservative Party (UK) MPs Category:English novelists Category:English perjurors Category:English thriller writers Archer of Weston-super-Mare Category:Members of the Greater London Council Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament for English constituencies Category:People from the City of London Category:People from Weston-super-Mare Category:UK MPs 1966–1970 Category:UK MPs 1970–1974 Category:UK MPs 1974 Category:British people convicted of perverting the course of justice Category:People educated at Wellington School, Somerset

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