Gloria Grahame
from the trailer for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Born	Gloria Hallward (1923-11-28)November 28, 1923 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died	October 5, 1981(1981-10-05) (aged 57) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1944–81
Spouse	Stanley Clements (1945–48) Nicholas Ray (1948–52) 1 child Cy Howard (1954–57) 1 child Anthony Ray (1960–74) 2 children

in her Academy Award–winning role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Gloria Grahame (November 28, 1923 – October 5, 1981) was an American Academy Award–winning actress.^[1]

Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios. Often cast in film noir projects, Grahame received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Crossfire (1947), and she won this award for her work in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). She achieved her highest profile with Sudden Fear (1952), Human Desire (1953),The Big Heat (1953), and Oklahoma! (1955), but her film career began to wane soon afterwards.

She returned to work on the stage, but continued to appear in films and television productions, usually in supporting roles. Diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1980, Grahame refused to accept the diagnosis and travelled to England to work in a play, eventually settling in the Aigburth area of Liverpool. Her health rapidly failed and she returned to New York City, where she died in 1981.

Early life[link]

Grahame was born Gloria Hallward in Los Angeles, California. Reginald Michael Bloxam Hallward, her father, was an architect and author and her mother, Jeanne McDougall, who used the stage name Jean Grahame, was a British stage actress and acting teacher. McDougall taught her younger daughter acting during her childhood and adolescence. The couple had another daughter, Joy Hallward (1911–2003), an actress who married John Mitchum (the younger brother of actor Robert Mitchum).

Grahame was signed to a contract with MGM Studios under her professional name after Louis B. Mayer saw her performing on Broadway for several years.

Career[link]

She made her film debut in Blonde Fever (1944) and then scored one of her most widely praised roles as the promiscuous Violet, saved from disgrace by George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). MGM was not able to develop her potential as a star and her contract was sold to RKO Studios in 1947.

Grahame was often featured in film noir pictures as a tarnished beauty with an irresistible sexual allure. During this time, she made films for several Hollywood studios. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Crossfire (1947).

Grahame starred with Humphrey Bogart in the 1950 film In a Lonely Place, a performance which garnered her considerable praise. Though today it is considered among her finest performances, it wasn't a box-office hit and Howard Hughes, owner of RKO Studios, admitted that he never saw it. When she asked to be loaned out for roles in Born Yesterday and A Place in the Sun, Hughes refused and instead made her do a supporting role in Macao. However, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in MGM's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).

Other memorable roles included the scheming Irene Nieves in Sudden Fear (1952), the femme fatale Vicki Buckley in Human Desire (1953), and mob moll Debby Marsh in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) in which, in a horrifying off-screen scene, she is scarred by hot coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin's character.

Grahame's career began to wane after her performance in the musical film Oklahoma! (1955). Grahame, whom audiences were used to seeing as a film noir siren, was viewed by some critics to be miscast as an ignorant country lass in a wholesome musical, and the paralysis of her upper lip from plastic surgery altered her speech and appearance. Additionally, Grahame was rumored to have been difficult on the set of Oklahoma!, upstaging some of the cast and alienating her co-stars, which furthered her fall from grace in Hollywood.^[2] She began a slow return to the theater, and returned to films occasionally to play supporting roles, mostly in minor releases. She appeared on television too, including an episode of the ABC sitcom, Harrigan and Son, starring Pat O'Brien, and a memorable episode of the gothic sci-fi series The Outer Limits, in which she spoofed her own career by playing a forgotten film star living in the past. She also appeared in "The Homecoming", a 1964 television episode of The Fugitive, starring David Janssen, playing the sinister Dorina Pruitt.

The play The Time of Your Life was revived in March 17, 1972 at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Los Angeles with Grahame, Henry Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss, Lewis J. Stadlen, Ron Thompson, Jane Alexander, Richard X. Slattery and Pepper Martin among the cast with Edwin Sherin directing.^[3][4]

Grahame has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6522 Hollywood Boulevard for her contribution to Motion Pictures.

Personal life[link]

Grahame had a string of stormy romances and failed marriages during her time in Hollywood, including marriages to director Nicholas Ray and later to Ray's son, Anthony, with whom she had an affair while still married to Ray. All of this took a toll on her career, as did a two-year hiatus after the birth of her daughter in 1956.^[5] Marital and child custody problems hampered her performance on the set of Oklahoma! Additionally, the actress's concern over the appearance of her upper lip led her to pursue plastic surgery and dental operations that caused visible scarring and ultimately rendered the lip largely immobile because of nerve damage, which affected her speech.^[6]

She married:

• Stanley Clements (1926–1981), actor, married August 1945, divorced 1 June 1948.^[7]
• Nicholas Ray, director, married 1 June 1948, separated 1951, divorced 1952. The couple had one child, Timothy (born November 1948, aka David Cyrus Howard during his mother's third marriage).^[5][8] Their marriage ended when Ray found Grahame in bed with his 13 year old son by his first marriage, Anthony, whom she later married.^[6][9][10]
• Cy Howard, writer, married 1954, divorced 1957. They had one daughter, Marianna Paulette (born 1956).
• Anthony Ray, her former stepson, married May 1960, divorced 1974. The Rays had two sons, Anthony Jr (born 1963) and James (born 1965).

In the late 1970s, Grahame traveled to England to perform in plays. While there, she met Liverpool actor Peter Turner with whom she had a romantic relationship. They moved to the USA and lived in New York and California, where their affair ended. Turner subsequently returned to England.

Death[link]

In 1980, Grahame was diagnosed with stomach cancer but refused surgery, insisting that she did not have the disease. In 1981, she traveled to England to perform in a play. While there, a procedure to have fluid drained from her stomach resulted in a perforated bowel. This became apparent only after she collapsed during a rehearsal.

Peter Turner heard the news that Grahame was ill in a hotel in Lancaster, England. Accompanied by members of his family, he collected her and took her to his home in Aigburth, Liverpool. There, he and his family nursed her until some of her children arrived to take her back to New York where, at the age of 57, she died.

She is interred in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California, as Gloria H. Grahame.

Bibliography[link]

• Vincent Curcio, Suicide Blonde: The Life of Gloria Grahame (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989)
• Peter Turner, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (New York: Grove Press, 1987)

Filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gloria Grahame

• Gloria Grahame at the Internet Movie Database
• Gloria Grahame at the TCM Movie Database
• Gloria Grahame at Find a Grave
• Gloria Grahame at Film Reference
• Gloria Grahame – Article by Donald Chase
• Gloria Grahame at Virtual History

Sterling Hayden
In The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Born	Sterling Relyea Walter (1916-03-26)March 26, 1916 Upper Montclair, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	May 23, 1986(1986-05-23) (aged 70) Sausalito, California, U.S.
Other names	Sterling Walter Hayden John Hamilton
Occupation	Actor, author, sailor, model, Marine, OSS agent
Years active	1941–82
Spouse	Madeleine Carroll (1942–46) Betty Ann de Noon (1947–58) Catherine Devine McConnell (1960–86)

Sterling Hayden (born Sterling Relyea Walter, March 26, 1916 – May 23, 1986) was an American actor and author. For most of his career as a leading man, he specialized in westerns and film noir, such as Johnny Guitar, The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing. Later on he became noted as a character actor for such roles as Gen. Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). He also played the Irish American policeman, Captain McCluskey, in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather in 1972, and the novelist Roger Wade in 1973's The Long Goodbye. At six feet five inches (196 cm),^[1] he was taller than most actors.

Biography[link]

Early life, education[link]

He was born in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, to George and Frances Walter, who named him Sterling Relyea Walter.^[2][3] After his father died, he was adopted at the age of nine by James Hayden and renamed Sterling Walter Hayden. He grew up in coastal towns of New England,^[4] and as a child lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Maine, where he attended Wassookeag School in Dexter, Maine.

Hayden was a genuine adventurer and man of action, not dissimilar from many of his movie parts. He dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and took a job as mate on a schooner.^[5] His first voyage was to Newport Beach, California from New London, Connecticut.^[4] Later, he was a fisherman on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, ran a charter yacht, and served as a fireman on eleven trips to Cuba aboard a steamer.^[4] He skippered a trading schooner in the Caribbean after earning his master's license, and in 1937 he served as mate on a world cruise of the schooner Yankee.^[4] After serving as sailor and fireman on larger vessels and sailing around the world several times, he was awarded his first command aged 22, skippering a square rigger from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Tahiti in 1938.^[4][6]

Hollywood years and military service[link]

Hayden became a print model and later signed a contract with Paramount Pictures, who dubbed the 6' 5" (1.96 m)^[1] actor "The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies" and "The Beautiful Blond Viking God". His first film starred Madeleine Carroll, with whom he fell in love and married.

After two film roles, he left Hollywood and joined the Marines as a private, under the name "John Hamilton" (a pseudonym Hayden only used in the military). While at Parris Island he was recommended for Officer Candidate School. After graduation, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and was transferred to service as an undercover agent with William J. Donovan's COI office. He remained there after it became the OSS.^[7][8][9]

As OSS agent John Hamilton, his World War II service included sailing with supplies from Italy to Yugoslav partisans and parachuting into fascist Croatia. Hayden, who also participated in the Naples-Foggia campaign and established air crew rescue teams in enemy-occupied territory, became a first lieutenant on September 13, 1944, and a captain on February 14, 1945. He received the Silver Star (for gallantry in action in the Balkans and Mediterranean; "Lt. Hamilton displayed great courage in making hazardous sea voyages in enemy-infested waters and reconnaissance through enemy-held areas"), a Bronze Arrowhead device for parachuting behind enemy lines, and a commendation from Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito. He left active duty on December 24, 1945.^[9]

His great admiration for the bravery of the Communist partisans led to a brief membership in the Communist Party. He was apparently active in supporting an effort by the Communist-controlled motion picture painters' union to absorb other film industry unions.^[10] As the Red Scare deepened in U.S., he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, confessing his brief Communist ties and "naming names."^[2] His wife at that time, Betty de Noon, insisted that the 'names' her ex-husband provided were already in the hands of the Committee, which had a copy of the Communist Party's membership list. In any event, Hayden subsequently repudiated his cooperation with the Committee, stating in his autobiography "I don't think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing."^[2]

Personal life[link]

Sterling Hayden often professed distaste for film acting, claiming he did it mainly to pay for his ships and voyages. In 1958, after a bitter divorce, he was awarded custody of his children. He defied a court order and sailed to Tahiti with all four children, Christian, Dana, Gretchen and Matthew.^[11] Marin County Superior Court Judge Harold Haley would later order Hayden to repay Republic Pictures, who financed the trip via two promissory notes, nearly $50,000 for defaulting on an agreement to repay the debt.^[12] In 1960, he married Catherine Devine McConnell. They had two sons, Andrew and David, and were married until his death in 1986. McConnell also had a son from her first marriage, the journalist Scott McConnell.

In the early 1960s, Hayden rented one of the pilot houses of the retired ferryboat Berkeley, docked in Sausalito, California where he resided while writing his autobiography Wanderer, which was first published in 1963. In it, he reminisces about turning points in his life:

"The sun beats down and you pace, you pace and you pace. Your mind flies free and you see yourself as an actor, condemned to a treadmill wherein men and women conspire to breathe life into a screenplay that allegedly depicts life as it was in the old wild West. You see yourself coming awake any one of a thousand mornings between the spring of 1954, and that of 1958 ‑ alone in a double bed in a big white house deep in suburban Sherman Oaks, not far from Hollywood.

"The windows are open wide, and beyond these is the backyard swimming pool inert and green, within a picket fence. You turn and gaze at a pair of desks not far from the double bed. This is your private office, the place that shelters your fondest hopes: these desks so neat, patiently waiting for the day that never comes, the day you'll sit down at last and begin to write.

"Why did you never write? Why, instead, did you grovel along, through the endless months and years, as a motion‑picture actor? What held you to it, to something you so vehemently professed to despise? Could it be that you secretly liked it—that the big dough and the big house and the high life meant more than the aura you spun for those around you to see?

"'Hayden's wild,' they said. 'He's kind of nuts‑but you've got to hand it to him. He doesn't give a damn about the loot or the stardom or things like that—something to do with his seafaring, or maybe what he went through in the war . . .'"^[2]:151

In the 1970s, after his appearance in The Godfather, he appeared several times on NBC's Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, where he talked about his career resurgence and how it had funded his travels and adventures around the world. Hayden bought a canal barge in the Netherlands in 1969, eventually moving it to the heart of Paris and living on it part of the time. He also shared a home in Wilton, Connecticut with his family and had an apartment in Sausalito.

Hayden was an accomplished author and wrote two acclaimed books: an autobiography, Wanderer (1962), and a novel Voyage (1976).

Sterling Hayden died of prostate cancer in Sausalito in 1986, age 70.^[5]

Bibliography[link]

• Wanderer. New York: Knopf. 1963. ISBN 1-57409-048-8. 
• Voyage: A Novel of 1896. New York: Putnam. 1976. ISBN 0-399-11665-6. 

Filmography[link]

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Hayden, Sterling (1977). Wanderer. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-07521-4. 
• Hayden, Sterling (1998). Wanderer. Dobbs Ferry: Sheridan House. ISBN 978-1-57409-048-2. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sterling Hayden

• Sterling Hayden at the Internet Movie Database
• Biography with many photos
• Sterling Hayden at Find a Grave
• Hayden related documents on his OSS service. National Archives and Records Administration (150 MB)
• Literature on Sterling Hayden

Video clips[link]

• Video clip from The Killing (1956)
• Video clips from Dr. Strangelove (1964) in black comedy role as General Jack D. Ripper with co-star Peter Sellers
• Video interview with Hayden at his home in Sausalito, CA, 1983

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.^[3] One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.^[4] His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940),^[5] an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.^[6]

Lang's parents were of Moravian^{[citation needed]} descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".^[7]

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded three times. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.

Expressionist films: the Weimar years (1918-1933)[link]

His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's five-hour Die Nibelungen, the famous 1927 film Metropolis, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924

Although some^[who?] consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.^{[citation needed]} His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin.

In 1931, after Woman in the Moon, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. His wearing a monocle added to the stereotype.

At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character.

Whereas Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage,^[7] his wife and screen writer Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1932. They soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under Nazi eugenics laws he would be identified as a Jew even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

Emigration[link]

On the set of The Woman in the Moon, 1929.

Shortly afterwards, Lang left Germany. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him that The Testament of Dr Mabuse was being banned but that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially Metropolis), he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had stated that it was during this meeting that he had decided to leave for Paris - but that the banks had closed by the time the meeting was over. Lang has stated that he fled that very evening. ^[8][9]

Lang left Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris^[10] after his marriage to Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, ended in 1933.^{[citation needed]}

In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States.^[10]

Hollywood career (1936-1957)[link]

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury, starring Spencer Tracy as a man wrongly lynched for a crime he didn't commit. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavorably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.

One of his most famous films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer Artur Brauner expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May),^[11] so Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his "Indian Epic". Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

Death and legacy[link]

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.^[12]

Filmography[link]

Pop culture[link]

• Lang appears as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le Mepris. During the film, his reputation is discussed, and he somewhat lampoons his own reputation for being a temperamental director.

• An old German director with the demeanor of Lang appears during the filming of a bank robbery in Woody Allen's 1969 comedy Take the Money and Run.

• In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, Lang is mentioned in tandem with James Cameron on page 48.

• A fictional Lang appears as a main character in the Fullmetal Alchemist movie Conqueror of Shambala.

• In Episode 11 of Season 1 of City Hunter, the antagonist's name is Fritz Lang.

• Madonna portrayed Lang for a sequence in her 1989 music video for "Express Yourself", complete with Lang's signature suit and monocle. The video itself is a tribute to Metropolis (film).

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Michaux, Agnès. 'Je les chasserai jusqu'au bout du monde jusqu'à ce qu'ils en crèvent; Paris: Editions 1, 1997; ISBN 2-86391-933-4
• Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0 (See e.g. pp. 45–46 for anecdotes revealing Lang's arrogance.)
• McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; New York: St. Martins Press, 1997; ISBN 0-312-13247-6
• Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood; Wien: Europaverlag, c1986; ISBN 3-203-50953-9 (in German)
• Youngkin, Stephen (2005). The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2360-7.  - Contains interviews with Lang and a discussion of the making of the film M

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Fritz Lang at the Internet Movie Database
• Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• Senses of Cinema - Biographie
• Fritz Lang at filmportal.de
• Interview with Fritz Lang from 1967
• Bibliography
• Fritz Lang at Find a Grave
• (French) "Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse. Représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933/1959-1960)", un article de Nicole Brenez extrait de De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier (1998).

Nicholas Ray (August 7, 1911 - June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause.

Ray is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer. Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, "cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Biography[link]

Early life and career[link]

He was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin. In his early years, he went to school and did a brief stint at the University of Chicago: here he was exposed to the media world through radio. Here he also met two men who inspired his move to films: Frank Lloyd Wright and dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor. Ray received a Taliesin Fellowship from Wright to study under him as an apprentice.^[1]

Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live by Night. It wasn't released for two years because of the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie sub-genre often called 'love on the run'. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live by Night, Thieves Like Us.)

The New York Times gave the film a positive review (despite calling Ray's trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight."^[2]

Ray made several more contributions to film noir, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie In a Lonely Place, about a troubled screenwriter, and On Dangerous Ground, a police thriller.

Other minor noir films he directed in this period were Born to Be Bad and A Woman's Secret.

Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s. In the mid-fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered: Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The former was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. (François Truffaut called it "the beauty and the beast" of the western). In 1955, Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When Rebel was released, soon after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on movie-making and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-culture significance, Rebel Without a Cause is the purest example of Ray’s cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture, and an empathy for social misfits.

Rebel Without a Cause was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming it was rumored that Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who at age 16 was 27 years his junior. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Dennis Hopper, who was also involved with Wood at the time, but they were reconciled later.

In 1956, Ray directed the melodrama Bigger Than Life starring James Mason as a small-town school teacher driven insane by the misuse of a new wonder-drug, Cortisone. In 1957, he directed The True Story of Jesse James, which was supposed to have featured Dean but starred Robert Wagner instead.^[3][4]

Later life[link]

Biographers state that Ray was bisexual;^[1] he himself denied this in 1977, but stated that everyone has occasional fantasies or daydreams about same-sex relations.^[5]

A heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. He kept on working, but his later films got little attention, and films like The Savage Innocents and the story of Jesus of Nazareth, King of Kings, were panned by critics. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he did not direct again until the mid-1970s.

In 1970 at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East, Ray ran into Dennis Hopper, who asked Ray to join him at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where he was editing his new film, The Last Movie. Hopper helped Ray secure a position at Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University in upstate New York.^[6] From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught filmmaking where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an autobiographical film employing multiple superimpositions. In the spring of 1972, Ray was asked to show some footage from the film at a conference. The audience was shocked to see footage of Ray and his students smoking marijuana together.^[6] An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979.

With the help of old friends, he secured teaching positions at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University.^[6]

Shortly before his death he collaborated on the direction of Lightning Over Water (also known as Nick’s Film) with German director Wim Wenders. He died of lung cancer on June 16, 1979 in New York City after a two-year illness.^[6] Ray died the same week as John Wayne, the star of Flying Leathernecks, a film Ray directed.

Personal life[link]

Ray was married to:

• Jean Evans, journalist, married 1936, divorced 1940. They had one son, Anthony (aka Tony, born 1937).
• Gloria Grahame, actress, whom he married in 1948. They separated in 1950 and divorced in 1952 after the director discovered Grahame in bed with his son, Tony, who was then 13 years old.^[6][7][8] (She and Tony Ray would marry in 1960.) Grahame and Nicholas Ray had one son, Timothy Ray.
• Betty Utley, dancer, married 1958, divorced 1964; two daughters, Nica and Julie.
• Susan Schwab, married 1969.

Influence[link]

Certain French New Wave directors and critics (most notably Jean-Luc Godard) held Ray in high regard. Wim Wenders' films are indebted to Ray, from the casting of Dennis Hopper in Rebel Without a Cause and the expressionistic use of colour in his own film The American Friend, to the title of his science fiction film Until the End of the World (which were the last spoken words in Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings).

Interrupted, a film about Ray to be directed by Philip Kaufman, was announced for 2007.

In the decades after his professional peak, Ray continues to influence directors to this day:

• Jean-Luc Godard was a huge admirer of Ray and famously said in his review of Bitter Victory:

"There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."

In addition, Godard's films abound in multiple references to Nicholas Ray's films. In Godard's film, Contempt, the character played by Michel Piccoli claims to have written Ray's Bigger Than Life and in La Chinoise, a young Maoist defends the politics of Johnny Guitar to his anti-American colleagues.

• Martin Scorsese is a fan of Ray's, particularly his expressionistic use of color in Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956). He used clips from two of them in his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

• Director Curtis Hanson is featured on a documentary for the DVD release of In A Lonely Place, giving his analysis of the film. The film was one of many influences on his direction of L.A. Confidential (1997).

• François Truffaut wrote essays about Ray (who is featured prominently in his book The Films in My Life). He asserts that They Live by Night (1949) is Ray's best movie, but gives special attention to his films Bigger Than Life (1956) and Johnny Guitar (1954).

• Wim Wenders is another European admirer of Ray's and has paid homage to him in many movies. He even gave Ray a cameo in his film The American Friend. He co-directed Ray's final film, the experimental documentary Lightning Over Water, and edited it after Ray's death. The film is a touching portrait of the final days of Nicholas Ray's life.

• At New York University, Ray taught and befriended cult director Jim Jarmusch, who became his assistant. In turn, Jarmusch says that he looked to Ray for script advice, and misses him to this day.

Filmography[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Eisenschitz, Bernard (1993). Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-14086-6. 
• Frascella, Lawrence; Weisel, Al (2005). Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause. Touchstone. ISBN 0-7432-6082-1. http://www.livefastdieyoungbook.com. 
• Andrew, Geoff (2004). The Films of Nicholas Ray. British Film Institute. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0-8445-7001-0|0-8445-7001-0]]. 

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Nicholas Ray at the Internet Movie Database
• Photos of Nicholas Ray at SUNY Binghamton (Harpur College) from 1970-72 during the making of “We Can't Go Home Again” by Mark Goldstein
• Nicholas Ray at Find a Grave
• The New Yorker article
• Tom Farrell, We Can't Go Home Again, "La furia umana", n° 3, winter 2010 on www.lafuriaumana.it
• Claudio Mazzatenta, Nicholas Ray's MARCO. Memory of working of Nick, "La furia umana", n° 3, winter 2010 on www.lafuriaumana.it
• NICHOLAS RAY: THE LAST INTERVIEW with Kathryn Bigelow and Sarah Fatima Parsons "La furia umana", n° 5 on www.lafuriaumana.it