User:PrinceArchelaus/sandbox

Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Born	Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (1909-02-11)February 11, 1909 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	February 5, 1993(1993-02-05) (aged 83) Bedford, New York, U.S.
Other names	Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Alma mater	Columbia University (BA)
Occupations	Screenwriter director producer
Years active	1929–1972
Spouses	Elizabeth Young ​ ​ (m. 1934; div. 1937)​ Rose Stradner ​ ​ (m. 1939; died 1958)​ Rosemary Matthews ​ (m. 1962)​
Children	4, including Tom Mankiewicz
Relatives	Herman J. Mankiewicz (brother) See Mankiewicz family

Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (/ˈmæŋkəwɪts/; February 11, 1909 – February 5, 1993) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is best known for his witty, literary, urbane dialogue and memorable characters. Also known as an actor's director, he directed several prominent actors, including Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor, to several of their memorable onscreen performances.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Mankiewicz studied at Columbia University and graduated in 1928. He moved overseas to Europe, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and translated German intertitles into English for UFA. On the advice of his screenwriter brother Herman, Mankiewicz moved back to the United States, and was hired by Paramount Pictures as a dialogue writer. He then became a screenwriter, writing for numerous films starring Jack Oakie. He next moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) where he served as a producer for several films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Woman of the Year (1942). Mankiewicz left MGM after a dispute with Louis B. Mayer.

In 1944, Mankiewicz began working for Twentieth Century-Fox, where he produced The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). He made his directorial debut with Dragonwyck (1946) after Ernst Lubitsch had dropped out due to illness. Mankiewicz remained at Twentieth Century-Fox, directing a broad range of genre films. Consecutively, in 1950 and 1951, he won two Academy Awards each for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). In 1953, Mankiewicz formed his own production company Figaro, where he independently produced, as well as wrote and directed, The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and The Quiet American (1958).

In 1961, Mankiewicz took over direction from Rouben Mamoulian for Cleopatra (1963). The production was beset with numerous difficulties, including a heavily publicized extramarital affair between the film's stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Relatively late into the production, Darryl F. Zanuck reassumed control of Twentieth Century-Fox as studio president, and briefly fired Mankiewicz for the film's excessive production overruns. Released in 1963, Cleopatra became the highest-grossing film of 1963 and earned mixed reviews from film critics. Mankiewicz's reputation suffered, and he did not return to direct another film until The Honey Pot (1967). He then directed There Was a Crooked Man... (1970) and the documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1972), sharing credit with Sidney Lumet. His final film Sleuth (1972), starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, earned Mankiewicz his fourth and final Oscar nomination as Best Director. In 1993, Mankiewicz died at Bedford, New York, at the age of 83.

Early life and education

Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish emigrants from Germany and Courland, respectively. Besides his older sister, Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck (1901–1979), he had an older brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897–1953), who brought him to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Herman also won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane (1941).

At age four, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City, graduating in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School. He followed his brother to Columbia University, where he initially wanted to be a psycharist. Mankiewicz once stated, "I took a pre-med course at Columbia. Then came the part where you disembowel frogs and earthworms, which horrified and nauseated me. But we really got me was physics." Mankiewicz failed the course, and switched his major to English and wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator. He graduated in 1928 and moved to Germany. There, he intended to enroll in the University of Berlin and finish at Oxford for a potential career in pedagogy. However, he abandoned these plans, and was hired as an assistant correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Sigrid Schultz, the Berlin bureau chief for the Tribune, gave Mankiewicz his first assignment, which was to interview explorer Umberto Nobile. Mankiewicz earned another job, translating film intertitles from German to English for UFA. He relocated to Paris, which Mankiewicz described as the "three most miserable months of my life." After receiving a despondent letter from his brother, Herman encouraged Joseph to move to Hollywood.

Career

1929–1933: Paramount

In 1929 Mankiewicz got a contract to work as a writer at Paramount, through his brother Herman. Herman was one of the writers on The Dummy (1929), on which Mankiewicz wrote titles. He also did titles for Close Harmony (1929) and The Man I Love (1929) with Jack Oakie, The Studio Murder Mystery (1929), Thunderbolt (1929), The River of Romance (1929), The Saturday Night Kid (1929) with Clara Bow, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), and The Virginian (1929) with Gary Cooper.

Mankiewicz started to be credited on screenplays for films like Fast Company (1929) starring Jack Oakie and Slightly Scarlet (1930) and he worked on the script for The Light of Western Stars (1930) with Richard Arlen and Paramount on Parade (1930). Mankiewicz wrote The Social Lion (1930) with Oakie, Only Saps Work (1930), The Gang Buster (1931) with Arlen, Finn and Hattie (1931) with Oakie, and June Moon (1931) with Oakie.

He also did the scripts for Skippy (1931) with Jackie Cooper, Dude Ranch (1931) with Oakie, Newly Rich (1931), and Sooky (1931), a sequel to Skippy. This was followed by This Reckless Age (1932), Sky Bride (1932) with Arlen and Oakie, Million Dollar Legs (1932) with Oakie and W.C. Fields, Night After Night (1932) (uncredited), and If I Had a Million (1932). He was borrowed by RKO for Diplomaniacs (1933) and Emergency Call (1933). He returned to Paramount for Too Much Harmony (1933) with Oakie and Bing Crosby, Meet the Baron (1933) (uncredited), and the all-star Alice in Wonderland (1933).

1934–1944: MGM

Mankiewicz signed a long-term contract with MGM. He wrote Manhattan Melodrama (1934), which was a huge hit. He freelanced for King Vidor to work on Our Daily Bread (1934). At MGM he wrote Forsaking All Others (1934) with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery as well as After Office Hours (1935) with Gable and Constance Bennett, Reckless (1935) with Jean Harlow and William Powell, Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), and I Live My Life (1935) with Crawford.

Mankiewicz was promoted to producer with Three Godfathers (1936). On most of his films as producer he would work uncredited on the script. Mankiewicz had a commercial and critical success with Fury (1936), the first American film directed by Fritz Lang. Mankiewicz produced a series of films starring Crawford: The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), Love on the Run (1936), The Bride Wore Red (1937), and Mannequin (1937).

Mankewicz also produced Double Wedding (1937) with William Powell and Myrna Loy; Three Comrades (1938), with Margaret Sullavan and Robert Taylor and director Frank Borzage, famously rewriting F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Shopworn Angel (1938) with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart; and The Shining Hour (1938) with Sullavan and Crawford, directed by Borzage. He also did some uncredited writing on The Great Waltz (1938), and the script which became The Pirate (1948).

He produced A Christmas Carol (1938); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) with Mickey Rooney; and Strange Cargo (1940) with Gable and Crawford, directed by Borzage. He had a huge hit with The Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. It was followed by The Wild Man of Borneo (1941), and The Feminine Touch (1941), then he had another big success with Hepburn, Woman of the Year (1942). Mankiewicz's final productions at MGM were Cairo (1942) with Jeanette MacDonald and Reunion in France (1942) with Crawford and John Wayne.

1944–1952: 20th Century Fox

Mankiewicz received an offer at 20th Century Fox that included the right to direct. His first film for the studio was The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), which he wrote with Nunnally Johnson and produced. It co-starred his wife Rose Stradner.

Mankiewicz made his directorial debut with Dragonwyck (1946), which he also wrote; Gene Tierney and Vincent Price starred. He followed it with Somewhere in the Night (1946), a film noir which he co-wrote. He worked as director only on The Late George Apley (1947) with Ronald Colman, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1948) with Tierney and Rex Harrison, and Escape (1948) with Harrison. All were based on scripts by Philip Dunne.

Mankiewicz had a huge success with A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which he wrote and directed, winning Oscars for both; Sol Siegel produced. He and Siegel collaborated again on House of Strangers (1949), on which Mankiewicz did some uncredited writing. Mankiewicz wrote and directed No Way Out (1950), which launched the career of Sidney Poitier; Darryl F. Zanuck was credited as producer. Zanuck also took that credit on Mankiewicz's next film, All About Eve (1950), which quickly became regarded as a classic.

Mankiewicz adapted and directed People Will Talk (1951), also produced by Zanuck, which starred Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain. He did some uncredited work on the script for I'll Never Forget You (1952). His last film under contract with Fox was 5 Fingers (1952), starring James Mason and Danielle Darrieux.

1953–1960: Figaro, Inc.

In 1951 Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialized, he continued to make films (both for his own production company Figaro and as a director-for-hire) that explored his favorite themes – the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance and the clash between people's urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.

In 1953 he adapted and directed Julius Caesar for MGM, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play produced by John Houseman. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, in The Story of Cinema, described it as a "film of quiet excellence, faltering only in the later moments when budget restrictions hampered the handling of the battle sequences". The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.

In 1953, Mankiewicz set up his own production company, Figaro. Its first production was The Barefoot Contessa (1954) which Mankiewicz wrote, produced and directed; it starred Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Sam Goldwyn hired him to write and direct the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955). This was a huge hit but not highly regarded critically. Brando starred along with Frank Sinatra and Jean Simmons.

In 1958 Mankiewicz wrote and directed The Quiet American for Figaro, an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel about American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, influenced by the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, switched the message of Greene's book, changing major parts of the story. A cautionary tale about America's blind support for "anti-Communists" was turned into, according to Greene, a "propaganda film for America".

That year Figaro produced I Want to Live! (1958) though Mankiewicz had relatively little to do with it. He directed Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) for producer Sam Spiegel, from a script by Gore Vidal and a play by Tennessee Williams. Elizabeth Taylor, Hepburn and Montgomery Clift starred. It was a hit at the box office but attracted mixed reviews.

1961–1963: Cleopatra

In 1961, 20th Century Fox was producing Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and hired Mankiewicz to replace director Rouben Mamoulian. Mankiewicz accepted a lucrative contract, which he came to regret. The film consumed two years of his life and ended up both derailing his career and adding to severe financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox.

1964–1993: Later career

Mankiewicz produced and directed Carol for Another Christmas (1964) for television. He wrote and directed The Honey Pot (1967) for United Artists and Charles K. Feldman, and produced and directed There Was a Crooked Man... (1970), as well as doing some uncredited work on the documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Mankiewicz garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth, his final directing effort, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, who also received Oscar nominations. He worked for a number of years on a screenplay adaptation of the novel Jane (as written by Dee Wells) before being removed from consideration after completing over half of the script. One description of his later years had him partaking in "writing in notebooks, transcribing facts, opinions and "tribal customs and taboos."

In 1983, he was a member of the jury at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Personal life

Family history

Mankiewicz was the younger brother of legendary Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-writer (with Orson Welles) of Citizen Kane among numerous other films. In 2024, Joseph and Herman were both announced as inductees into the Luzerne County Arts & Entertainment Hall of Fame.

His sons are Eric Reynal (from his first marriage, to actress Elizabeth Young), producer Christopher Mankiewicz, and writer/director Tom Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alex Mankiewicz.

He was the uncle of Frank Mankiewicz, a well-known political campaign manager who officially announced the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, a writer who was struck and killed by a taxicab in New York City at the age of 36.

His great-nephews include writer-filmmaker Nick Davis (Johanna's son), NBC Dateline reporter Josh Mankiewicz and television personality Ben Mankiewicz (Frank's sons).

Death

Mankiewicz died of a heart attack on February 5, 1993, six days before his 84th birthday. He was interred in Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard cemetery in Bedford, New York.

Filmography

Year	Title	Director	Producer	Writer	Notes	Ref.
1929	Fast Company	No	No	Yes
1930	Slightly Scarlet	No	No	Yes
	Paramount on Parade	No	No	Yes
1931	The Social Lion	No	No	Yes
	Only Saps Work	No	No	Yes
	The Gang Buster	No	No	Yes
	Finn and Hattie	No	No	Yes
	June Moon	No	No	Yes
	Skippy	No	No	Yes
	Newly Rich	No	No	Yes
	Sooky'	No	No	Yes
1932	This Reckless Age	No	No	Yes
	Sky Bride	No	No	Yes
	Million Dollar Legs	No	No	Yes
	If I Had A Million (1932)	No	No	Yes	segments "China Shop", "Three Marines", "Violet"
1933	Diplomaniacs	No	No	Yes
	Emergency Call	No	No	Yes
	Too Much Harmony	No	No	Yes
	Alice in Wonderland	No	No	Yes
1934	Manhattan Melodrama	No	No	Yes
	Our Daily Bread	No	No	Yes	Dialogue
	Forsaking All Others	No	No	Yes
1935	I Live My Life	No	No	Yes
1940	The Philadelphia Story	No	Yes	No
1942	Woman of the Year	No	Yes	No
1944	The Keys of the Kingdom	No	No	Yes
1946	Dragonwyck	Yes	No	Yes
	Somewhere in the Night	Yes	No	Yes
1947	The Late George Apley	Yes	No	No
	The Ghost and Mrs. Muir	Yes	No	No
1948	Escape	Yes	No	No
1949	A Letter to Three Wives	Yes	No	Yes
	House of Strangers	Yes	No	uncredited
1950	No Way Out	Yes	No	Yes
	All About Eve	Yes	No	Yes
1951	People Will Talk	Yes	No	Yes
1953	Julius Caesar	Yes	No	No
1954	The Barefoot Contessa	Yes	No	Yes
1955	Guys and Dolls	Yes	No	Yes
1958	The Quiet American	Yes	Yes	Yes
1959	Suddenly, Last Summer	Yes	No	No
1963	Cleopatra	Yes	No	Yes
1964	Carol for Another Christmas	Yes	No	No	Television film
1967	The Honey Pot	Yes	No	Yes
1970	There Was a Crooked Man...	Yes	Yes	No
1972	Sleuth	Yes	No	Yes

Sources and notes

Works cited

Biographies (chronological)

• Geist, Kenneth L. (1978). Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. New York: Scribners. ISBN 0-684-15500-1.
• Stern, Sydney Ladensohn (2019). The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-617-03267-7.
• Davis, Nick (2021). Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, a Dual Portrait. New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN 978-1-400-04183-1.

Miscellaneous

• Broadsky, Jack; Weiss, Nathan (1963). The Cleopatra Papers: A Private Correspondence. New York: Simon & Schuster. OCLC 219877884.
• Dauth, Brian, ed. (2008). Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-934-11024-9.
• Mankiewicz, Joseph L.; Carey, Gary (1972). More About 'All About Eve'. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-48248-4.
• Mankiewicz, Tom; Crane, Robert (2012). My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider's Journey through Hollywood. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-813-14057-5.
• Lower, Cheryl Bray (2001). Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays and Guide to Resources. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0-7864-0987-8.
• Oderman, Stuart. Talking to the Piano Player 2. BearManor Media. ISBN 1-59393-320-7.
• Segaloff, Ned (2013). Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors. Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-593-93233-6.