Film director, screenwriter, and producer, born in Goshen, Indiana, USA. A plane and car racer in his teens, he worked as a prop boy in Hollywood during college vacations. He served with the Army Air Corps in World War 1 and, returning to California to work in an aircraft factory, he soon decided to try the new film industry, where he held a variety of jobs in the production field before moving on to writing and producing films. His directorial debut was with his own script, The Road to Glory (1926), which launched a career that spanned 45 years and a broad spectrum of genres, from gangster films (Scarface, 1932) and Westerns (Red River, 1948) to screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby, 1938) and musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953). Not much of an innovator but in total control of his films, he was a no-nonsense teller of strong stories, and he came to be highly regarded by French students of film and was awarded an honorary Oscar (1974).
Hawks was known for his versatility as a director, filming comedies, dramas, gangster films, sci-fi, pulp noir, and Westerns with equal ease and skill.
Critic Leonard Maltin has labelled Hawks "the greatest American director who is not a household name," noting that, while his work may not be as well known as Ford, Welles, or Hitchcock, he is no less a talented filmmaker.
Although originally dismissed by the more intellectual critics in the English-speaking world (especially in the United Kingdom, where his work was virtually ignored by Sight and Sound), Hawks was idolised and taken very seriously indeed by the French critics associated with Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, and this spread to the United Kingdom where Hawks became an icon for Ian Cameron, Robin Wood and the other critics associated with Movie.
Hawks was married three times, to Athole Shearer (a sister of movie actress Norma Shearer), Nancy Gross (later and better known as Slim Keith, she was the mother of his daughter, Kitty Hawks, a noted interior designer), and Dee Hartford (an actress whose real name was Donna Higgins). His brothers were director/writer Kenneth Neil Hawks and film producer William Bettingger Hawks.
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