Sidney Lumet

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Sidney Lumet (2007)

Sidney Lumet [ 'sɪdni luːˈmɛt ] (born June 25, 1924 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † April 9, 2011 in New York City ) was an American director , screenwriter and actor .

After working as a theater actor, he worked as a television director from the early 1950s. International fame brought him directing Die Twelve Geschworen (1957), which was followed by other award-winning cinema productions (including Serpico , Hundstage , Network and The Verdict ). He has directed more than 70 film and television productions of all genres and has been nominated four times for directing and one for screenwriting Oscar over the course of his six decades of career . In 2005 Lumet, who was praised as the “master of judicial film”, received the Oscar of Honor for his life's work.

Life

Lumet as a teenager (1939), photograph by Carl Van Vechten

The son of Polish-born Jews grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New York City from 1926. His father was the actor and radio writer Baruch Lumet, his mother the actress Eugenia Wermus. As a child, he was on stage alongside his parents in various Yiddish plays and attended the Professional Children's School . From 1935 he worked as an actor on New York Broadway and made his debut with a small role in Sidney Kingsley's successful play Dead End . He played the role of Jesus in Max Reinhardt's The Eternal Road (1937) and Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem (1940) . After studying dramatic literature for a semester at Columbia University , Lumet joined the US Army and was stationed as a radio and radar specialist in India and Burma for three years during World War II from 1942 . After returning from India in 1946, he left the army and formed one of the first off-Broadway theater groups, The Actor's Workshop . Thanks to the mediation of his friend Yul Brynner , he got a position at the CBS in 1950 as an assistant director and later worked there as a television director. From the mid-1950s onwards he also directed several Broadway productions ( Night of the Auk , 1956; Caligula , 1960; Nowhere to Go But Up , 1962).

Success came through the collaboration with the author Reginald Rose , whose plays he staged several times for television. Lumet's international breakthrough as a director came in 1957 with his film debut The Twelve Jurors . The story of Rose, which he had already successfully filmed for American television, centered on the jury members of a murder trial who were convinced by a jury (played by Henry Fonda ) of the defendant's innocence. The film brought Lumet its first nominations for the Oscar and Golden Globe Awards for Best Director as well as the Golden Bear at the 1957 Berlin International Film Festival . His 1964 drama Der Pfandleiher marked a career highlight for Rod Steiger , who received a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for his role as Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman, in addition to various international awards. Also in the 1960s, Lumet took on several theater film adaptations by Eugene O'Neill ( The Iceman Cometh , made for television in 1960 as part of Play of the Week ) and Anton Chekhov ( The Seagull , 1968; with Vanessa Redgrave ). His almost three-hour film version of O'Neill's play One Long Day Journey into the Night (1962) was considered an artistic success , for which the leading actress Katharine Hepburn received an Oscar nomination and the entire cast was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival . Woody Allen would later name the production A Pile of Great Dogs (1965) filmed in Spain as Lumet's best work. The war drama tells of a group of soldiers who rebelled against the sadistic camp leader in a British military prison camp in North Africa during World War II .

Lumet worked in almost all genres in the following decades, but developed above all into a specialist in judicial and police films . After he was released from directing the musical film Funny Girl (1968) due to differences of opinion with film producers Ray Stark and Barbra Streisand , the heist movies The Anderson Clan (1971) with Sean Connery and Dyan Cannon and the genre classic Serpico (1973), in who Al Pacino investigates as the eponymous hero of police corruption. Lumet was to be nominated for an Oscar four more times: in 1976 as the director of Hundstage , the recreation of an authentic bank robbery in New York by two amateur perpetrators (played by, among others, Al Pacino and John Cazale ); 1977 for the direction of the Mediensatire Network about an older newscaster ( Peter Finch ), who after his resignation lets the ratings soar as a "moral preacher" before he is shot by his television station by a hired terrorist group in front of running cameras; 1982 as the screenwriter of the police film Prince of the City in which Treat Williams investigates corruption in his own ranks as a special investigator and in 1983 as director of the judicial film The Verdict - The Truth and Nothing But Truth About a Shabby Boston Lawyer ( Paul Newman ) who fights against the renowned hospital, doctors and star defenders in the interests of a woman who has fallen into a coma due to an anesthetic error. Although he did not see himself as a "competitive man", Lumet was mainly offended by the defeats at Network and The Verdict . From the 1990s he was unable to build on earlier successes, although he repeatedly devoted himself to one of his favorite subjects, corruption (including Fatal Questions , 1990; Night Over Manhattan , 1997). An exception was his last film Deadly Decision - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). The black-humored thriller told of two brothers in financial distress ( Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman ) who set up a robbery on their parents' jewelry store, resulting in tragedy. Two years earlier, Lumet had in the 77th Academy Awards the (2005) Honorary Award received for his life's work.

Lumet stuck to the label of a "New York director" because the stories of many of his films were set in his hometown. ... the ugliness of the city is beautiful. New York has the highest energy level of any city in the world. When you shoot there, you have the feeling of sitting on a huge lid that can fly up at any time and shoot you straight into the sky. And you can also see this energy on the screen. says Lumet. The Hollywood director was seen as a perfectionist, a professional craftsman, while his films often revolved around the subject of power and the abuse of power, as well as about people who become helpers or victims of this power. Lumet rarely needed more than two or three takes and cut the material while it was being recorded ( The Verdict actor Paul Newman nicknamed him " Speedy Gonzales " because of this ). As a rule, he rehearsed with his actors several weeks before shooting began and placed great value on above-average performance. 18 representations from ten of his works were nominated for an Oscar between 1962 and 1988 - Ingrid Bergman ( Murder on the Orient Express ), Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight (all for Network ) won the award. Bodo Traber ( Die Welt ) paid tribute to Lumet in a portrait on his 80th birthday in 2004 as a pioneer of New Hollywood . His films would always hold up a mirror to the society of their time and turn anti-heroes and the oppressed into heroes. "In the subtext they are mostly about the symbolic struggle of an outsider against an overpowering institution," says Traber. Lumet believed in the kind of films that went a step further than just entertaining: "It [the film] is designed to inspire viewers to study different facets of their conscience, to think about and to stimulate the brain," says Lumet .

Sidney Lumet has been married four times. After his marriage to actress Rita Gam , he was married to actress and fashion designer Gloria Laura Vanderbilt from 1956 to 1963 and to Gail Jones, daughter of Lena Horne , from 1963 to 1978 . All of these marriages ended in divorce. In 1980 he married the journalist Mary Gimbel. Lumet was the father of two daughters and a son. His daughter Jenny Lumet (* 1967) followed in her father's footsteps and wrote the award-winning film script for Rachel's wedding (2008). Published in 1995 with Lumet Making Movies (dt .: Title Films make ) a film manual.

Sidney Lumet died at the age of 86 in Manhattan , New York, at the beginning of April 2011 from lymphatic cancer .

Filmography

Feature films

Television films and series

  • 1948: Studio One (Studio One Summer Theater; Studio One in Hollywood; Summer Theater; Westinghouse Studio One; Westinghouse Summer Theater) - TV series (until 1958); Lumet directed several episodes
  • 1950: Danger - TV series (until 1955); Lumet directed several episodes
  • 1951: Crime Photographer - TV series (until 1952)
  • 1952: CBS Television Workshop - television series; Lumet directed several episodes
  • 1953: You Are There - television series (until 1957); Lumet directed several episodes
  • 1953: The United States Steel Hour (The US Steel Hour) - television series (until 1963); Lumet directed two episodes
  • 1954: The Best of Broadway television series (until 1955); Lumet directed two episodes
  • 1954: The Elgin Hour - television series (until 1955); Lumet directed one episode
  • 1955: The Alcoa Hour - TV series (until 1957); Lumet directed one episode
  • 1956: Playhouse 90 - television series (until 1961); Lumet directed several episodes
  • 1957: Mr. Broadway - TV series
  • 1958: All the King's Men television series
  • 1960: The Sacco-Vanzetti Story television series
  • 1960: The Iceman Cometh - play adapted for television
  • 1960: Rashomon - theater play adapted for television
  • 2001: 100 Center Street television series (until 2002); Lumet directed ten episodes
  • 2004: The interrogation (Strip Search) - TV film

Awards (selection)

documentation

  • By Sidney Lumet , documentary based on a 2008 interview with Lumet, United States, 2015, directed by Nancy Buirski .

Works

  • Sidney Lumet: making films. From the script to the finished film. Authors' House Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86671-001-6 .

literature

  • Frank R. Cunningham: Sidney Lumet. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2015, ISBN 978-0-8131-5826-6 .

Web links

Commons : Sidney Lumet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Pflaum, HG: In case of doubt, against the prosecutor . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 18, 1997, p. 14.
  2. ↑ a b c d cf. Sidney Lumet . In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 23/2009 from June 2, 2009 (accessed April 10, 2011 via Munzinger Online ).
  3. ↑ a b c d cf. Coyle, Jake: US filmmaking great Sidney Lumet dies in NY at 86 . The Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 10, 2011, 3:07 AM GMT (accessed via LexisNexis Business ).
  4. ↑ a b c cf. Vallance, Tom: Sidney Lumet . In: Independent Extra , April 11, 2011, p. 8.
  5. ↑ cf. Messias, Hans: Fatal Decision - Before the Devil knows you're dead . In: film-dienst , 8/2008 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).
  6. ↑ cf. Lueken, Verena: This is New York . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 23, 2010, No. 247, p. Z1
  7. ↑ a b cf. Traber, Bodo: A pioneer of “New Hollywood”: Director Sidney Lumet turns 80 . In: Die Welt , June 25, 2004, p. 26
  8. ↑ cf. Film: US director Sidney Lumet died on welt.de, April 9, 2011 (accessed April 10, 2011).
  9. ^ Sidney Lumet, Director of American Film Classics, Dies at 86. In: The New York Times . April 9, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Lumet, Sidney
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film director
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, United States
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 2011
Place of death Manhattan , New York City, New York, United States