- published: 08 Nov 2014
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Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 – April 10, 1962) was an Academy award winning Hungarian-American film director. He had early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertész. He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States, many of them cinema classics, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Sea Hawk, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
Curtiz was born Kertész Kaminer Manó to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary). He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886. Both the date and the year are open to doubt: he was fond of telling tall stories about his early years, including that he had run away from home to join the circus and that he had been a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the 1912 Olympic Games, but he seems to have had a conventional middle-class upbringing. He studied at Markoszy University and the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, Budapest, before beginning his career as an actor and director as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.
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Actors: Barbara Hershey (actress), Andrew Gottlieb (producer), Robert Banas (actor), Hal Linden (actor), Alan Oppenheimer (actor), Lee Purcell (actress), Darren McGavin (actor), Denise Crosby (actress), George Coe (actor), John Dennis Johnston (actor), James Bacon (actor), Carl Esmond (actor), David Schroeder (actor), Ken Thorne (composer), Don Taylor (writer),
Genres: Biography, Drama,Actors: Franklyn Farnum (actor), Dudley Dickerson (actor), Mel Blanc (actor), Tom Dugan (actor), David Butler (actor), Frank Cady (actor), Irving Bacon (actor), Jack Carson (actor), Paul Bradley (actor), Edward Clark (actor), Gary Cooper (actor), Michael Curtiz (actor), Marcel De la Brosse (actor), Sayre Dearing (actor), Pat Flaherty (actor),
Plot: A waitress at the Warner Brothers commissary is anxious to break into pictures. She thinks her big break may have arrived when actors Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan agree to help her.
Keywords: faked-pregnancy, filmmaking, hollywood, studio