Film director, born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA. After studying architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright, he became an actor and occasional director for radio and the stage. His film directorial debut came with They Live by Night (1949). A specialist in depicting social rebellion, characterized by tense and restless camera movement, his films include Knock on Any Door (1949), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and 55 Days at Peking (1963). With this last film he effectively retired from Hollywood (though he worked with New York State University students in filming You Can't Go Home Again, finished 1976), but his reputation continued to increase, due primarily to the tributes from foreign students of film and from many Hollywood insiders.
Nicholas Ray|
Nicholas Ray in The American Friend |
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| Born: |
7 August 1911 Galesville, Wisconsin, USA |
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| Died: |
16 June 1979 New York City, NY, USA |
| Occupation: | Film director |
Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) (August 7, 1911–June 16, 1979) was an American film director.
Coming out of a radio background, Ray directed his first film, They Live By Night, in 1947. An almost impressionistic, tender take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 70’s remake of They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us.)
Ray made several more contributions to the film noir genre, most notably the Humphrey Bogart movie In A Lonely Place about a troubled screenwriter, and On Dangerous Ground, a powerful police thriller.
Other minor film noirs he directed in this period were Born to Be Bad and A Woman’s Secret.
Alongside these acclaimed, influential works Ray also made many other films in multiple genres which, although made with professionalism and flair, were comparatively minor works, often suffering from unwanted studio interference.
A bisexual and heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught filmmaking at Harpur College (part of the State University of New York at Binghamton) where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an ambitious autobiographical film employing split-screen images. An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. Wim Wenders' films are indebted to Ray, from the casting of Rebel Without a Cause's Dennis Hopper and the expressionistic use of colour in his own film The American Friend, to the title of sci-fi film Until The End of the World (which were the last spoken words in Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings).
Film director Philip Kaufman will tackle an untitled film about the life of Ray.
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