Chester Erskine
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Chester Erskine (born November 29, 1905 in Hudson , New York , † April 7, 1986 in Beverly Hills , Los Angeles , California ) was an American screenwriter , film director and film producer . He became internationally known through films such as The Egg and Me , All My Sons , Angel Face or Androkles and the Lion . In addition, he was also active as a stage actor , theater director and theater producer in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s .
life and career
Chester Erskine was born in Hudson, New York, in 1905. After Erskine trained as an actor at Union University in Tennessee in the mid-1920s , he toured the United States as a stage actor before finally settling in New York, where he joined the 1929 revue Harlem , which he produced and wrote celebrated great success. He then directed and produced various self-written plays on Broadway in the following years , before he gained his first film experience in Hollywood at the cinema production Rain in the early 1930s, supported by the film producer and director Lewis Milestone . With the drama Call It Murder in 1934, he then directed the film for the first time, while also acting as a screenwriter and producer.
After the Second World War , Erskine shifted his focus of work entirely to Hollywood, where he oversaw numerous film projects as a screenwriter, director and producer, including the cinema productions Das Ei und Ich (1947), the literary film adaptation of All My Sons (1948) with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster , Angel Face (1952) with Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons , Androkles and the Lion (1952), Witness to Murder (1954) or Hot Frontier (1959). His last work as a screenwriter was in 1970 for Jean Negulesco's adventure film The Dirty Heroes of Yucca with the cast Stuart Whitman , Elke Sommer and Curd Jürgens .
In his long career, Erskine has mainly worked as a screenwriter, but has also directed several times himself and has also worked more than half a dozen times as a film producer. Chester Erskine died on April 7, 1986 at the age of 80 in Beverly Hills, California.
Awards
- 1949: Nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Drama for All My Sons
- 1949: Nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for The Robert Meltzer Award for All My Sons
Filmography (selection)
As a screenwriter
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As a film director
As a film and television producer
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literature
- Chester Erskine. In: Larry Langman: Destination Hollywood: The Influence of Europeans on American Filmmaking. McFarland, 2000, p. 8.
Web links
- Chester Erskine in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Short biography of Chester Erskine in The New York Times
- Films by Chester Erskine with German distribution titles
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chester Erskine. In: Arnold Rampersad, Langston Hughes, Dolan Hubbard: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 14, Autobiography: I Wonder As I Wander. University of Missouri Press, 2003, p. 402.
- ^ Obituary to Chester Erskine In: The New York Times.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Erskine, Chester |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American screenwriter, film director and producer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 29, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hudson , New York , USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 7, 1986 |
| Place of death | Beverly Hills , Los Angeles , California , USA |