Registi
by polsellioscar | created - 3 months ago | updated - 4 hours ago | Public
1. Auguste Lumière
Producer | Londres, alerte de pompiers: film Lumière n° 246
Auguste Lumière was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist, born in Besançon, France. He attended the Martinière Technical School and worked as a manager at the photographic company of his father, Antoine Lumière. Although it is his brother Louis Lumière who is generally ...
2. Louis Lumière
Producer | La Mi-Carême, Char et batailles de confettis
Louis Lumière was a French engineer and industrialist who played a key role in the development of photography and cinema. His parents were Antoine Lumière, a photographer and painter, and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small ...
3. Filoteo Alberini
Director | La malia dell'oro
Filoteo Alberini was born on March 14, 1865 in Orte, Papal State [now Lazio, Italy]. Filoteo was a cinematographer and director, known for La malia dell'oro (1905), Il varo della 'Regina Elena' alla Spezia (1904) and Visita di Mascagni all'esposizione (1904). Filoteo died on April 12, 1937 in Rome,...
4. Georges Méliès
Director | À la conquête du pôle
Georges Méliès was a French illusionist and film director famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.
Méliès was an especially prolific innovator in the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, ...
5. George Albert Smith
Director | Phantom Ride
Along with his better-known French counterpart Georges Méliès George Albert Smith was one of the first filmmakers to explore fictional and fantastic themes, often using surprisingly sophisticated special effects. His background was ideal--an established portrait photographer, he also had a ...
6. James Williamson
Director | Attack on a China Mission
James Williamson was born on November 8, 1855 in Kirkaldy, Scotland, UK. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Attack on a China Mission (1900), Stop Thief! (1901) and Spring Cleaning (1903). He died on August 18, 1933 in Richmond, Surrey, England, UK.
7. D.W. Griffith
Director | The Birth of a Nation
David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 ...
8. Alice Guy
Director | The Woman of Mystery
The world's first female filmmaker, French-born Alice Guy entered the film business in 1896 as a secretary at Gaumont, a manufacturer of movie cameras and projectors who had purchased a "cinématographer" from its inventors, the Lumiere brothers. The next year Gaumont became the world's first motion...
9. Max Linder
Actor | Seven Years Bad Luck
Although all too frequently neglected by fans of silent comedy, Max Linder is in many ways as important a figure as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, not least because he predated (and influenced) them all by several years and was largely responsible for the creation of the classic ...
10. André Deed
Actor | L'uomo meccanico
Starting his show-business career as a singer and acrobat in French music halls, Deed got in almost at the ground floor of the French film industry, making his debut in 1905. It didn't take him long to become one of France's first major comic film stars, and he soon became internationally famous. ...
11. Giovanni Pastrone
Director | Cabiria
Giovanni Pastrone was born on September 13, 1883 in Montechiaro d'Asti, Piedmont, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for Cabiria (1914), Julius Caesar (1909) and Il fuoco (la favilla - la vampa - la cenere) (1916). He died on June 27, 1959 in Turin, Piedmont, Italy.
12. Hans Richter
Director | Dreams That Money Can Buy
Hans Richter was born on April 6, 1888 in Berlin, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), 8 X 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1955) and Chesscetera (1957). He was married to Frida Ruppel, Erna Niemeyer, Maria van Vanselow and Elisabeth Steiner. He died ...
13. Walter Ruttmann
Cinematographer | Metropolis
Walter Ruttmann was born on December 28, 1887 in Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for Metropolis (1927), Mannesmann - Ein Film der Mannesmannröhren-Werke (1937) and Acciaio (1933). He was married to Christine Margarete Helene Prasch, Nina Hamson, Erna Treitel and...
14. Marcel Duchamp
Famous Dada artist who shocked the world when he submitted a urinal signed "R.Mutt" to the 1917 first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists at the Armory Show in New York. It was reported in a press account that (Duchamp under pseudonym) J.C. Mutt of Philadelphia, little known ...
15. Viking Eggeling
Director | Symphonie diagonale
Viking Eggeling was born on October 21, 1880 in Lund, Skåne län, Sweden. He was a director, known for Diagonal Symphony (1924). He died on May 19, 1925 in Berlin, Germany.
16. Fernand Léger
Art_department | L'inhumaine
Fernand Léger was born on February 4, 1881 in Argentan, Orne, France. He was a director and actor, known for L'inhumaine (1924), Ballet mécanique (1924) and Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947). He was married to Nadia Leger and Jeanne-Augustine Lohy. He died on August 17, 1955 in Gif-sur-Yvette...
17. Marcel L'Herbier
Director | L'inhumaine
Marcel L'Herbier was born on April 23, 1888 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, known for L'inhumaine (1924), Le bonheur (1934) and Sacrifice d'honneur (1935). He was married to Marcelle Pradot. He died on November 26, 1979 in Paris, France.
18. Germaine Dulac
Director | Âme d'artiste
The daughter of a cavalry captain, she was raised by a grandmother in Paris, where she studied various forms of art with an emphasis on music and the opera. In 1905 she married engineer-novelist Marie-Louis Albert-Dulac and under his influence veered toward journalism. As one of the leading radical...
19. René Clair
Writer | Le silence est d'or
René Clair was born on November 11, 1898 in Paris, France. He was a writer and director, known for Man About Town (1947), Beauties of the Night (1952) and The Grand Maneuver (1955). He was married to Bronia Clair. He died on March 15, 1981 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
20. Salvador Dalí
Art_department | Spellbound
Surrealist-turned-catholic painter Dalí worked on various movies as well. While a member of the French surrealist group, he co-wrote Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) with Luis Buñuel. The latter may have marked the beginning of a long-lasting quarrel with the surrealists when Dalí did ...
21. Luis Buñuel
Writer | Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie
The father of cinematic Surrealism and one of the most original directors in the history of the film medium, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the ...
22. Jean Cocteau
Writer | La Belle et la Bête
Jean Cocteau was one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century. In addition to being a director, he was a poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, and actor. He began writing at 10 and was a published poet by age 16. He collaborated with the "Russian Ballet" company of Sergei...
23. Man Ray
Director | Home Movies
American painter and artist in various media who participated in a few films. He helped found the Dada movement and was the prime American participant in the Surrealist movement. An American expatriate to Paris in the 1920s, he was a member of the so-called "Lost Generation" of creative minds ...
24. Abel Gance
Writer | La roue
Born an illegitimate son of a wealthy physician, Abel Flamant, and a working class mother, Francoise Perethon. He was raised by his mother and her boyfriend, who later became her husband, Adolphe Gance. Pressured by his parents, he began his working career as a lawyer's clerk in hopes of achieving ...
25. Jacques Feyder
Director | La kermesse héroïque
Jacques Feyder was born on July 21, 1885 in Ixelles, Brabant, Belgium. He was a director and writer, known for Carnival in Flanders (1935), Le grand jeu (1934) and Fahrendes Volk (1938). He was married to Françoise Rosay. He died on May 24, 1948 in Rive-de-Prangins, Switzerland.
26. Louis Delluc
Director | Fumée noire
Louis Delluc was born on October 14, 1890 in Le Buisson-de-Cadouin, Dordogne, France. He was a director and writer, known for Fumée noire (1920), The Woman from Nowhere (1922) and L'inondation (1924). He was married to Ève Francis. He died on March 22, 1924 in Paris, France.
27. Jean Epstein
Director | La chute de la maison Usher
Jean Epstein was born on March 25, 1897 in Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire [now Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Mauprat (1926) and Le lion des Mogols (1924). He died on April 2, 1953 in Paris, France.
28. Jean Renoir
Writer | La règle du jeu
Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, he had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for whom he ...
29. Jean Vigo
Writer | Zéro de conduite : Jeunes diables au collège
Jean Vigo had bad health since he was a child. Son of anarchist militant Miguel Almareyda, he also never really recovered from his father's mysterious death in jail when he was 12. Abandoned by his mother, he passed from boarding school to boarding school. Aged 23, through meetings with people ...
30. Stellan Rye
Director | Der Flug in die Sonne
Stellan Rye was born on July 4, 1880 in Randers, Denmark. He was a director and writer, known for Der Flug in die Sonne (1914), Ein Sommernachtstraum in unserer Zeit (1914) and The Student of Prague (1913). He died on November 14, 1914 in France.
31. Paul Wegener
Actor | Der Golem
Paul Wegener was born in Arnoldsdorf, West Prussia, part of the German Empire. His birthplace is currently part of Poland, under the name "Jarantowice". Wegener's family included a number of scientists, the most notable being his cousin Alfred Wegener (1880-1930). Alfred is remembered as the ...
32. Robert Wiene
Director | Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
Robert Wiene was born on April 24, 1873 in Breslau, Silesia, Germany [now Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland]. He was a writer and director, known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Das wandernde Licht (1916) and The Knight of the Rose (1925). He died on July 17, 1938 in Paris, France.
33. F.W. Murnau
Director | Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
F.W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air ...
34. Fritz Lang
Actor | Le mépris
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. ...
35. Paul Leni
Director | The Man Who Laughs
Paul Leni was born on July 8, 1885 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an art director and director, known for The Man Who Laughs (1928), Das Rätsel von Bangalor (1918) and The Last Warning (1928). He died on September 2, 1929 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
36. Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Director | Komödianten
Georg Wilhelm Pabst is considered by many to be the greatest director of German cinema, in his era. He was especially appreciated by actors and actresses for the humane way in which he treated them. This was in contrast to some of his contemporaries, such as Arnold Fanck, who have been ...
37. Ernst Lubitsch
Director | To Be or Not to Be
From Ernst Lubitsch's experiences in Sophien Gymnasium (high school) theater, he decided to leave school at the age of 16 and pursue a career on the stage. He had to compromise with his father and keep the account books for the family tailor business while he acted in cabarets and music halls at ...
38. Victor Sjöström
Actor | Smultronstället
Victor Sjöström was born on September 20, 1879, and is the undisputed father of Swedish film, ranking as one of the masters of world cinema. His influence lives on in the work of Ingmar Bergman and all those directors, both Swedish and international, influenced by his work and the works of ...
39. Mauritz Stiller
Director | Erotikon
Moshe "Mauritz" Stiller, born July 17, 1883, in Helsinki, Finland, was a director, writer and actor. He began his artistic activity in the theatre, as an actor at 16. Mauritz Stiller portrayed 87 roles from 1899-1916 and directed 16 productions 1911-28. Together with Viktor Sjöström ( director, ...
40. Carl Theodor Dreyer
Writer | Gertrud
The illegitimate son of a Danish farmer and his Swedish housekeeper, Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen on the 3th of February, 1889. He spent his early years in various foster homes before being adopted by the Dreyers at the age of two. Contrary to popular belief (perhaps nourished by the ...
41. Buntarô Futagawa
Director | Orochi
Buntarô Futagawa was born on June 18, 1899 in Tokyo, Japan. He was a director and actor, known for Orochi (1925), Shisen ni tateba (1924) and Ekisutora gâru (1925). He was married to Nobuko Suzuki. He died on March 28, 1966 in Japan.
42. Teinosuke Kinugasa
Director | Jigokumon
Former female impersonator who entered films in 1917 as an actor, turned to directing in 1922 and made some of the most formally brilliant Japanese films of the following decades. The few of Kinugasa's early works to have reached the West betray a highly mature, sophisticated talent. His best-known...
43. Yasujirô Ozu
Writer | Tôkyô monogatari
Tokyo-born Yasujiro Ozu was a movie buff from childhood, often playing hooky from school in order to see Hollywood movies in his local theatre. In 1923 he landed a job as a camera assistant at Shochiku Studios in Tokyo. Three years later, he was made an assistant director and directed his first ...
44. Frank Capra
Director | It's a Wonderful Life
One of seven children, Frank Capra was born on May 18, 1897, in Bisacquino, Sicily. On May 10, 1903, his family left for America aboard the ship Germania, arriving in New York on May 23rd. "There's no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They're all miserable. It's the most degrading place you ...
45. Lon Chaney
Actor | He Who Gets Slapped
Although his parents were deaf, Leonidas Chaney became an actor and also owner of a theatre company (together with his brother John). He made his debut at the movies in 1912, and his filmography is vast. Lon Chaney was especially famous for his horror parts in movies like e.g. Quasimodo in The ...
46. Alfred Hitchcock
Director | Psycho
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; 1863 - 1942) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (born 1890) and ...
47. James Whale
Director | Bride of Frankenstein
James Whale was an English film director, theatre director and actor. He is best remembered for his four classic horror films: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He also directed films in other genres, including what is ...
48. John Ford
Director | The Quiet Man
John Ford came to Hollywood following one of his brothers, an actor. Asked what brought him to Hollywood, he replied "the train". He became one of the most respected directors in the business, in spite of being known for his westerns, which were not considered "serious" film. He won six Oscars, ...
49. William A. Wellman
Director | A Star Is Born
William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called "Wild Bill" during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle.
A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the 29th...
50. Michael Curtiz
Director | Casablanca
Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner...
51. Karl Freund
Cinematographer | Metropolis
Karl Freund, an innovative director of photography responsible for development of the three-camera system used to shoot television situation comedies, was born on January 16, 1890, in the Bohemian city of Koeniginhof, then part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire (now known as Dvur Kralove in the Czech...
52. Cecil B. DeMille
Producer | The Ten Commandments
His parents Henry C. DeMille and Beatrice DeMille were playwrights. His father died when he was 12, and his mother supported the family by opening a school for girls and a theatrical company. Too young to enlist in the Spanish-American War, Cecil followed his brother William C. de Mille to the New ...
53. King Vidor
Director | War and Peace
King Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter of Hungarian descent. He was born in Galveston, Texas to lumberman Charles Shelton Vidor and his wife Kate Wallis. King's paternal grandfather Károly (Charles) Vidor had fled Hungary as a refugee following the failed ...
54. Josef von Sternberg
Director | The Devil Is a Woman
Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Forced by poverty to drop ...
55. Frank Borzage
Director | Bad Girl
Frank Borzage was born on April 23, 1894 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Bad Girl (1931), 7th Heaven (1927) and No Greater Glory (1934). He was married to Juanita Scott, Edna Skelton and Rena Rogers. He died on June 19, 1962 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, ...
56. Rex Ingram
Actor | God's Little Acre
A Corsicana native, Rex (Clifford) Ingram was the son of Mack and Mamie Ingram. He graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in medicine before launching a brilliant acting career which spanned 50 years. Ingram made his screen debut during the silent era in Tarzan of the Apes (1918). He ...
57. Rex Ingram
Director | The Great Problem
Renowned director Rex Ingram started his film career as a set designer and painter. His directorial debut was The Great Problem (1916). A true master of the medium, Ingram despised the business haggling required in the Hollywood system. He was also unhappy with the level of writing he found in ...
58. Robert J. Flaherty
Director | Louisiana Story
Robert J. Flaherty was born on February 16, 1884 in Iron Mountain, Michigan, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Louisiana Story (1948), Man of Aran (1934) and Elephant Boy (1937). He was married to Frances H. Flaherty. He died on July 23, 1951 in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA.
59. Marshall Neilan
Actor | Daddy-Long-Legs
In the early days of silent pictures, Marshall Neilan was a top director for Goldwyn Pictures. He had also directed a small number of Louis B. Mayer's independently produced melodramas, but there was a mutual dislike between the two men. During the festivities inaugurating the merger of Metro and ...
60. Erich von Stroheim
Actor | Sunset Blvd.
Erich von Stroheim was born Erich Oswald Stroheim in 1885, in Vienna, Austria, to Johanna (Bondy), from Prague, and Benno Stroheim, a hatter from Gleiwitz, Germany (now Gliwice, Poland). His family was Jewish.
After spending some time working in his father's hat factory, he emigrated to America ...
61. Charles Chaplin
Writer | The Great Dictator
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the ...
62. Buster Keaton
Actor | The General
Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Keaton. Joe and Myra were Vaudevillian comedians with a popular, ever-changing variety act, giving Keaton an eclectic and interesting upbringing. In the earliest days on stage, they traveled with a medicine ...
63. Edgar Wallace
Writer | King Kong
Edgar Wallace was born on April 1, 1875 in Greenwich, London, England, UK. He was a writer and director, known for King Kong (2005), King Kong (1933) and King Kong (1976). He was married to Ethel Violet King and Ivy Maude Caldecott. He died on February 10, 1932 in Hollywood, California, USA.
64. Victor Fleming
Director | Gone with the Wind
Victor Fleming entered the film business as a stuntman in 1910, mainly doing stunt driving - which came easy to him, as he had been a mechanic and professional race-car driver. He became interested in working on the other side of the camera, and eventually got a job as a cameraman on many of the ...
65. Marcel Carné
Director | Le quai des brumes
Marcel Carné, the son of a cabinet maker, entered the movies as the assistant of Jacques Feyder. At the age of 25 he directed his first movie Jenny (1936). Colaborating with the writer Jacques Prévert, the decorator Alexandre Trauner, the musician and composer Maurice Jaubert and the actor Jean ...
66. Walt Disney
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Flora Disney (née Call) and Elias Disney, a Canadian-born farmer and businessperson. He had Irish, German, and English ancestry. Walt moved with his parents to Kansas City at age seven, where he spent the majority of ...
67. Mikio Naruse
Director | Ukigumo
Considered a major figure of Japan's 'golden age of cinema', Mikio Naruse was a filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed 89 films in the period 1930 to 1967. Although Naruse's work is lesser known in the twenty-first century than those of his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi...
68. Kenji Mizoguchi
Director | Ugetsu monogatari
Coming from a lower class family Mizoguchi entered the production company Nikkatsu as an actor specialized in female roles. Later he became an assistant director and made his first film in 1922. Although he filmed almost 90 movies in the silent era, only his last 12 productions are really known ...
69. Sadao Yamanaka
Writer | Kuchibue o fuku bushi
The director and screenwriter Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938) is a key figure in the development of early Japanese cinema. Although he made 27 films over a six-year period, only three of them survived in nearly complete form: Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935), Humanity and Paper Balloons...
70. Tod Browning
Director | Dracula
Belonging to a well-situated family, Charles Browning fell in love at the age of 16 with a dancer of a circus. Following her began his itinerary of being clown, jockey and director of a variety theater which ended when he met D.W. Griffith and became an actor. He made his debut in Intolerance (1916)...
71. Sergei Eisenstein
Director | Ivan Groznyy
The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd as a young man. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In the following years, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and ...
72. Vsevolod Pudovkin
Director | Admiral Nakhimov
Vsevolod Pudovkin was born on February 28, 1893 in Penza, Russian Empire [now Russia]. He was a director and actor, known for Admiral Nakhimov (1947), Zhukovsky (1950) and Minin i Pozharskiy (1939). He was married to Anna Zemtsova. He died on June 30, 1953 in Jurmala, Latvian SSR, USSR [now Latvia].
73. Lev Kuleshov
Director | Po zakonu
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian director who used the editing technique known as the "Kuleshov effect." Although some of the editing innovations, such as crosscutting were used by other directors before him, Kuleshov was the first to use it in the Soviet Russia. he was driving a Ford sports car amidst ...
74. Dziga Vertov
Director | Chelovek s kino-apparatom
Dziga Vertov was born on January 2, 1896 in Bialystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Podlaskie, Poland]. He was a director and writer, known for Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Three Songs About Lenin (1934) and The Sixth Part of the World (1926). He was married to Elizaveta Svilova. He ...
75. Benjamin Christensen
Director | Hævnens nat
Benjamin Christensen was born on September 28, 1879 in Viborg, Denmark. He was a director and writer, known for Blind Justice (1916), Häxan (1922) and The Devil's Circus (1926). He was married to Karen Winther, Sigrid Stahl and Ellen Arctander. He died on April 2, 1959 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
76. Billy Wilder
Writer | The Apartment
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many ...
77. Roberto Rossellini
Writer | Roma città aperta
The master filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, as one of the creators of neo-realism, is one of the most influential directors of all time. His neo-realist films influenced France's nouvelle vague movement in the 1950s and '60s that changed the face of international cinema. He also influenced American ...
78. Orson Welles
Actor | Citizen Kane
His father, Richard Head Welles, was a well-to-do inventor, his mother, Beatrice (Ives) Welles, a beautiful concert pianist; Orson Welles was gifted in many arts (magic, piano, painting) as a child. When his mother died in 1924 (when he was nine) he traveled the world with his father. He was ...
79. Maya Deren
Director | Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren came to the USA in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkowsky. Together with her father Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and her mother Maria Fidler, an artist, she fled the pogroms organized by the Bolsheviks against the Jews. She studied journalism and political science at the Syracuse ...
80. Vittorio De Sica
Director | Ladri di biciclette
Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee ...
81. David Lean
Director | Lawrence of Arabia
An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding ...
82. John Huston
Director | The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English,...
83. Michael Powell
Director | Peeping Tom
The son of Thomas William Powell and Mabel (nee Corbett). Michael Powell was always a self-confessed movie addict. He was brought up partly in Canterbury ("The Garden of England") and partly in the south of France (where his parents ran a hotel). Educated at Kings School, Canterbury and Dulwich ...
84. Emeric Pressburger
Writer | The Red Shoes
Educated at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart, Emeric Pressburger worked as a journalist in Hungary and Germany and an author and scriptwriter in Berlin and Paris. He was a Hungarian Jew, chased around Europe (he worked on films for UFA in Berlin and Paris) before World War II, finally ...
85. William Wyler
Director | The Best Years of Our Lives
William Wyler was an American filmmaker who, at the time of his death in 1981, was considered by his peers as second only to John Ford as a master craftsman of cinema. The winner of three Best Director Academy Awards, second again only to Ford's four, Wyler's reputation has unfairly suffered as the...
86. George Cukor
Director | My Fair Lady
George Cukor was an American film director of Hungarian-Jewish descent, better known for directing comedies and literary adaptations. He once won the Academy Award for Best Director, and was nominated other four times for the same Award.
In 1899, George Dewey Cukor was born on the Lower East Side of...
87. Lotte Reiniger
Director | Silhouetten
Lotte Reiniger was born on June 2, 1899 in Berlin, Germany. She was a director and writer, known for Silhouetten (1936), Der Graf von Carabas (1935) and Lotte Reiniger - The Fairy Tale Films (1961). She was married to Carl Koch. She died on June 19, 1981 in Dettenhausen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
88. Otto Preminger
Actor | Stalag 17
Otto Ludwig Preminger was born in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. His father was a prosecutor, and Otto originally intended to follow his father into a law career; however, he fell in love with the theater in his 20's and became one of the most imaginative stage producers and directors. He was ...
89. Luchino Visconti
Writer | Il gattopardo
Born in his ancestral palazzo, situated in the same Milanese square as both the opera house La Scala and the Milan Cathedral, Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) was raised under the auspices of aristocratic privilege, theater and Catholicism. This triangulation of monuments would create an equally ...
90. Rudolf Ising
Producer | The Milky Way
While animation was still in its infancy during the early twenties, Walt Disney managed to recruit the brightest and best talent nationwide and imported it into Hollywood. Two of these pioneers artists were close friends Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising. They had first tasted success by helping to ...
91. Jacques Tourneur
Director | Cat People
Born in Paris in 1904, Tourneur went to Hollywood with his father, director Maurice Tourneur around 1913. He started out as a script clerk and editor for his father, then graduated to such jobs as directing shorts (often with the pseudonym Jack Turner), both in France and America. He was hired to ...
92. Maurice Tourneur
Director | Au nom de la loi
Screenwriter and director Maurice Tourneur was born Maurice Thomas in the Parisian suburb of Belleville on February 2, 1873, the son of a jewelry merchant. He was trained and employed as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator as a young man. After serving in a French artillery unit in ...
93. Howard Hawks
Director | Red River
What do the classic films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Sergeant York (1941), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959) have in...
94. Fred Niblo
Fred Niblo entered films in 1917 after two decades as a touring actor in vaudeville and one-time manager of 'The Four Cohans' (he married Josephine Cohan, the sister of George M. Cohan). He made his film debut with two early Australian silent films in 1916. He worked for Thomas H. Ince from 1917 as ...
95. James Cruze
Actor | The Covered Wagon
Coming from a Mormon family in Utah, James Cruze was reportedly part Ute Indian. He worked as a fisherman to pay his way through drama school. Among his former wives were actresses Betty Compson (also from Utah) and Marguerite Snow. He was also married to Alberta McCoy (died on July 7, 1960), who ...
96. Rupert Julian
Actor | The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin
Coming to the US at the age of 34, New Zealand-born Rupert Julian started his career as a stage and screen actor touring Australia and New Zealand. Having made his name (and a cool million for Universal) as a dead ringer for Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 1918 film The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), ...
97. Winsor McCay
Writer | Gertie the Dinosaur
Like many pioneers, the work of 'Winsor McCay' has been largely superseded by successors such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer but he more than earns a place in film history for being the American cinema's first great cartoon animator. He started out as a newspaper cartoonist, achieving a national ...
98. J. Stuart Blackton
Director | The Glorious Adventure
In the US from the age of 10, he first worked as a journalist-illustrator for the New York World. Interviewing Thomas A. Edison, he so impressed the inventor with his drawings that Edison suggested he allow some of them to be photographed by the Kinetograph camera. The result was a short film, ...
99. Segundo de Chomón
Director | Un portero modelo
Segundo de Chomón became involved in film through his wife, who was an actress in Pathé films. In 1902 he became a concessionary for Pathé in Barcelona, distributing its product in Spanish-speaking countries and managing a factory for the coloring of Pathé films. He began shooting footage of ...
100. Raoul Walsh
Editor | The Birth of a Nation
Raoul Walsh's 52-year directorial career made him a Hollywood legend. Walsh was also an actor: He appeared in the first version of W. Somerset Maugham's "Rain" renamed Sadie Thompson (1928) opposite Gloria Swanson in the title role. He would have played the Cisco Kid in his own film In Old Arizona ...
Tell Your Friends