Archie Mayo

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Archibald "Archie" Louis Mayo (born January 29, 1891 in New York , † December 4, 1968 in Guadalajara , Mexico ) was an American film director .

Life

Archie Mayo started out as a stage actor and gag writer when he was a teenager, and came to Hollywood in his mid-20s. In 1917 he made his directorial debut with Henry Lehrmans L-KO Kompany. At first he shot exclusively slapstick short films, in the first half of the 1920s for Christie Studios . From 1926, feature films followed, between 1927 and 1937 almost exclusively for Warner Brothers . There he was responsible for several films by Kay Francis , James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck , among others . His best-known Warner films from the early 1930s include Street of Women and Svengali , which was based on the novel Trilby by George du Maurier and starred John Barrymore . In 1933 he directed the revealing scandalous film Convention City , which is now considered lost because its copies were destroyed after the Hays Code was introduced . Mayo was considered an efficient director who rarely put a personal stamp on his films, but instead tailored them to the stars in the leading roles.

Probably his best-known film today is the crime drama The Petrified Forest (1936), set in the desert, starring Bette Davis , Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart . In the 1940s, his comedies stood out, including Charley's Aunt (1941) with Jack Benny and One Night in Casablanca (1946) with the Marx Brothers . His last work was the black-humored fantasy film Angel on My Shoulder (1946), in which Paul Muni, as a dead gangster, makes a pact with the devil played by Claude Rains . Then he said goodbye to the film business, only in 1958 he returned again to work as a producer of the film The Beast of Budapest about the Hungarian uprising in 1956 .

After the death of his first wife Lucille in 1945, he married Barbara Lane that same year, with whom he stayed until his death and had two children. He died of cancer at the age of 77 in Guadalajara, Mexico. Mayo was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame . After his death in 1968 he was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archie Mayo in the All Movie Guide
  2. ^ Archie Mayo in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 19, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Mayo, Archie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mayo, Archibald L.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film director
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , USA
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1968
Place of death Guadalajara , Mexico