Rouben Mamoulian

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Rouben Mamoulian on an Armenian postage stamp

Rouben Mamoulian (born October 8, 1897 in Tbilisi , Georgia , † December 4, 1987 in Woodland Hills, California ) was an American film and theater director.

Life

Coming from an Armenian banking family in Tbilisi, Mamoulian spent part of his childhood in Paris, studying criminology at the University of Moscow and later acting with Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov. In 1918 he founded his own stage in Tbilisi and went on tour to England in 1920, where he later took acting and drama lessons in London for three years. In 1923 he moved to the United States, where he staged operas and operettas at the George Eastman Theater in Rochester . In 1926 he was already teaching at the New York Theater Guild, where in 1927 he staged a performance of Porgy and Bess , which was admired by critics . In 1929 he took over the direction of the early sound film Applaus , which was filmed in the New York Astoria Studios of Paramount . Helen Morgan played the leading role . The film received high acclaim from critics for its innovative use of tone and dialogue in the dramaturgy of the story.

In 1931 he went to Hollywood with a contract with Paramount to realize streets of the metropolis with Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney in the leading roles. The camera work is fluid, almost like being shot with a handheld camera, the use of internal dialogues is revolutionary for the time. One of Mamoulian's most famous films is the adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , who won Fredric March the Oscar for Best Actor . The scenes between March and Miriam Hopkins , which strike a balance between violence and sexuality, made Mamoulian the most talked-about director of the year. Most beautiful, love me , an operetta with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald was also an artistic and financial success. Some critics praised that Mamoulian had beaten Ernst Lubitsch in his own parade ground, the slightly frivolous social comedy.

In 1933, the Mamoulian studio entrusted Marlene Dietrich , whose career was in crisis, with The High Song . The actress's first directorial work without the participation of Josef von Sternberg tells the story of a peasant girl who finally finds true happiness after some erotic adventures. The story had already been filmed as a silent film with Pola Negri a few years earlier . Most critics felt the studio should have left it at that. Mamoulian's prestige was so great that Louis B. Mayer personally committed himself to loan him for the comeback of Greta Garbo after eighteen months of absence from the screen for MGM : Queen Christine was a very vague biography of Queen Christine of Sweden , which only rudimentary reference to the actual Take events that led to the Queen's abdication. Produced with great effort, it contains two of Mamoulian's best-known scenes: the “I remember space” sequence in which Garbo moves quietly through a room to the beat of a metronome and touches all objects in order to preserve the magic of the moment. And the final scene in which only the completely empty, expressionless face of the actress appears on the screen. With a profit of $ 650,000, Queen Christine was instrumental in getting MGM solvent through the toughest economic year in the film industry.

The following year, producer Samuel Goldwyn hired Mamoulian to turn his protégée Anna Sten into Hollywood's greatest dramatic star. We Live Again , loosely based on Tolstoy's story Resurrection, was artistically and financially disappointing. The next film, the first full-length film in the improved 3-color Technicolor , Becky Sharp , the adaptation of the novel Vanity Fair , was technically innovative and style-defining, but financially and artistically a failure. The Duchess' ball before the Battle of Waterloo proved that the deliberate use of color can enhance the dramaturgy of the scenes. Over the next few years Mamoulian shot a number of films from a wide variety of genres, but none of the films could come close to the quality of the early 1930s. Nevertheless, these works, such as the lavish musical High, Wide, and Handsome with Irene Dunne from 1937 or the coat-and-sword epic Under the Sign of Zorro with Tyrone Power, are characterized by elegant camera work and fluid staging. In König der Toreros , shot again with power in 1941, the lighting was based on the works of Goya , Velázquez and El Greco . Of the later works, especially Summer Holiday from 1948, a musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and silk stockings , a dance film with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse notable for the integration of singing and dancing in the staging of the plot.

Mamoulian often had problems with the studio bosses. In 1944, in the middle of the filming of Laura, he was replaced by Otto Preminger . In 1958, he also lost the direction of Porgy and Bess to Preminger . Also in the sacking ended in 1961 his participation in the mammoth company Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor as Egyptian queen. The finished film, which should see many changes of direction, contains a ten-minute segment that was still directed by Mamoulian.

Over the years Mamoulian has returned repeatedly to Broadway, where he has been responsible for some of the most spectacular productions ever. Especially his staging of Oklahoma! , with Agnes de Mille as the choreographer in charge, revolutionized the staging of musicals overnight in 1943. The piece had 2,212 performances between 1943 and 1948. Carousel from 1945 was also a great artistic success. Together with Maxwell Anderson he wrote the screenplay for the film Never Steal Anything Small in 1959 . In 1964 he wrote the children's book Abigayil and in 1965 Hamlet Revised and Interpreted .

Mamoulian had been married to Azida Newman since 1945.

In 1982 the Directors Guild of America gave him the DW Griffith Award . In 1984 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In Hollywood, he was honored with a star on the Walk of Fame on Vine Street.

Filmography

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oklahoma! in the Internet Broadway Database (English)
  2. ^ Honorary Members: Rouben Mamoulian. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 2, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Mamoulian, Rouben
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film and theater director
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Tbilisi , Georgia
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1987
Place of death Woodland Hills, California , USA