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| Also Known As: | Otto Ludwig Preminger, Otto Ludwig Preminger | Died: | April 23, 1986 |
| Born: | December 5, 1906 | Cause of Death: | cancer |
| Birth Place: | Austria | Profession: | director, producer, actor, drama professor, theater director |
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Former assistant to German stage producer Max Reinhardt who began his directing career with the 1935 Broadway melodrama, "Libel". Preminger then directed a couple of B films at 20th Century-Fox before a dispute with Darryl F. Zanuck temporarily halted his behind-the-camera career. When he found himself in demand as an actor--Preminger's stern features and Viennese accent made him the perfect screen Nazi--he used this new popularity to maneuver his way back into the director's chair. Preminger made his breakthrough with the critical and commercial smash, "Laura" (1944), on which he took over the direction from Rouben Mamoulian. His subsequent work at Fox was disappointing and he began independently producing his own films, through his Carlyle Productions company, in the early 1950s. Preminger soon earned a reputation for turning out controversial works which broached previously taboo subjects such as drug addiction ("The Man With the Golden Arm" 1955).A skilled technician who lacked any consistently discernable style, Preminger's career encompassed polished successes including "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "Exodus" (1960), "Advise and Consent" (1961) and "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965), alongside...
Former assistant to German stage producer Max Reinhardt who began his directing career with the 1935 Broadway melodrama, "Libel". Preminger then directed a couple of B films at 20th Century-Fox before a dispute with Darryl F. Zanuck temporarily halted his behind-the-camera career. When he found himself in demand as an actor--Preminger's stern features and Viennese accent made him the perfect screen Nazi--he used this new popularity to maneuver his way back into the director's chair. Preminger made his breakthrough with the critical and commercial smash, "Laura" (1944), on which he took over the direction from Rouben Mamoulian. His subsequent work at Fox was disappointing and he began independently producing his own films, through his Carlyle Productions company, in the early 1950s. Preminger soon earned a reputation for turning out controversial works which broached previously taboo subjects such as drug addiction ("The Man With the Golden Arm" 1955).
A skilled technician who lacked any consistently discernable style, Preminger's career encompassed polished successes including "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), "Exodus" (1960), "Advise and Consent" (1961) and "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965), alongside notable flops such as "Saint Joan" (1957) and "Rosebud" (1975). Father, by stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, of producer-screenwriter Eric Lee Preminger and brother of agent-turned-producer Ingo Preminger.
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Notes
Preminger's "narrative lines are strewn with deceptive counterpaths, shifting viewpoints, and ambiguous characters who perpetually slip out of static categories and moral definitions...Preminger frequently mystifies the spectator who is looking for a fixed moral reference."--Richard Roud ("Cinema": A Critical Dictionary")
Writing about Preminger's 20th Century-Fox film noir classics of the late 1940s, Jean-Pierre Coursodon wrote in "American Directors": [They are] "not only thematically similar, they look alike, and generate the same kind of atmosphere....The fluidity of the camerawork is the concrete expression of his attitutde to his material. The camera unobtrusively but relentlessly follows the characters around in medium shots and long boom or dolly shots, so as to integrate them to the surroundings. Preminger's vision is a global one, he strives to capture the whole, not details--hence the paucity of close-up and reaction shots in his films....This stylistic option is consistent with Preminger's unfailingly objective attitude toward characters and situations....If the harmony of form and content, expression and intention, is the mark of 'classic' art, Preminger is one of the great classics of the American film."
In his autobiography, Preminger explains the discrepancy in his birth date and place: "One set of documents lists Vienna as my birthplace but another set...places my birth at my great-grandfather's farm some distance away. One records that I was born on the fifth of December, 1906, the other exactly one year earlier."
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