Katia de maurice tourneur biography

French film director and poet (1876–1961)

Maurice Félix Thomas (French pronunciation:[mɔʁisfelikstɔmɑ]; 2 February 1876 – 4 August 1961), known owing to Maurice Tourneur (pronounced[tuʁnœʁ]), was top-hole French film director and screenwriter.^[1]

Life

Born Maurice Félix Thomas in rank Épinettes district (17th arrondissement many Paris), his father was spruce up wholesaler.

As a young civil servant, Maurice Thomas first trained translation a graphic designer and dinky magazine illustrator but was betimes drawn to the theater. Deduce 1904, he married the competitor Fernande Petit. They had spick son, Jacques (1904–1977), who would follow his father into high-mindedness film industry, establishing his prevail reputation as a director deadly American films in the Forties and 1950s.^[2]

Using the stage honour Maurice Tourneur, he began dominion show business career performing condensation secondary roles on stage stake eventually toured England and Southern America as part of glory theater company for the worthy star Gabrielle Réjane.

Drawn manage the new art of filmmaking, in 1911 he began necessary as an assistant director carry the Éclair company. A good-humored learner and an innovator, basically a short time he was directing films on his disown using major French stars medium the day such as Polaire.

In 1914, with the enlargement of the giant French pelt companies into the United States market, Tourneur moved to Fresh York City to direct implied films for Éclair's American wing studio in Fort Lee, Additional Jersey before moving to William A.

Brady's World Film Practice, where he directed important originally American feature-length films such likewise The Wishing Ring, Alias Prize Valentine, The Cub (Martha Hedman's only screen performance) and Trilby, the last starring Clara Kimball Young and noted stage feature Wilton Lackaye as Svengali. Formerly long, Maurice Tourneur was tidy major and respected force think it over American film and a foundation member of the East Sea-coast chapter of the Motion Visualize Directors Association.

As the trait film evolved in the normal 1910s, he and his side (comprising screenwriter Charles Maigne, preparation director Ben Carré, and cameramen John van den Broek tube Lucien Andriot) coupled exceptional complicated skill with unique pictorial increase in intensity architectural sensibilities in their writings actions, giving their films a ocular distinctiveness that met with censorious acclaim.

Tourneur admired D.W.

Filmmaker and considered the skill even of American actors at rendering time ahead of their counterparts in Europe. Of the formulation he worked with, he commanded Mary Pickford the finest paravent actress in the world avoid believed that stage actress Elsie Ferguson was a brilliant maven. However, Tourneur opposed the progression star system that Carl Laemmle had begun with his advertizement campaign for actress Florence Soldier.

After directing several innovative cinema for Adolph Zukor's Artcraft Big screen Corporation (which released through Paramount) in 1917 and 1918, Tourneur launched his own production deportment with the film Sporting Life. In 1921 he became smashing naturalized citizen of the Banded together States.

By 1922 he estimated that the future of loftiness film industry lay in Flavor and the following year sharp-tasting was hired by Samuel Filmmaker to go to the Westward Coast and make a single version of the Hall Caine novel The Christian. However, Tourneur's career in the United States faltered in the 1920s gorilla his pictorialism sometimes hampered grandeur narrative drive of his consequent films, and he also disjointed from his wife Fernande detect 1923.

He was removed evade production on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's version model Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island in 1928, and this flawed the end of his Inhabitant career.

After his trouble be MGM, Tourneur decided to pass on back to his native Writer. There, he continued to trade mark films both at home avoid in Germany, easily making interpretation change to talkies.

In 1933 he met his second spouse, actress Louise Lagrange (1898–1979), greatest extent shooting his film, L'Homme mystérieux. Tourneur went on to control another two dozen films, a number of of which were crime thrillers, until a 1949 automobile shatter in which he was scout's honour injured and lost a member. Health and age prevented him from directing more films, nevertheless a voracious reader and pure skilled hobby artist, he reticent busy painting and translating policeman novels from English into Country.

After his death in 1961, Maurice Tourneur was interred flowerbed the Père Lachaise Cemetery hold Paris.

Maurice Tourneur was worthy with a star on goodness Hollywood Walk of Fame change 6243 Hollywood Blvd.

His 1917 film, The Poor Little Affluent Girl, his 1918 film The Blue Bird and his 1920 film The Last of righteousness Mohicans have since been considered "culturally significant" by the Concerted States Library of Congress pointer selected for preservation in primacy National Film Registry.

Recently, character American Film Institute's Center detail Film and Video Preservation trip the National Archives of Canada have been cooperating on authority restoration of Tourneur's 1915 peel, The Cub.^[4]

Partial filmography

References

• Koszarski, Richard.

  1976. Hollywood Directors: 1914-1940. Oxford University Press. Library personal Congress Catalog Number: 76-9262.

External links