Jules Dassin

From Grokipedia

Julius Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008), known professionally as Jules Dassin, was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor whose career spanned Hollywood film noir and European crime dramas. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he began in New York theater and radio before entering Hollywood in the early 1940s as an assistant to Alfred Hitchcock.

Dassin's pre-blacklist films, including Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Thieves' Highway (1949), and Night and the City (1950), exemplified gritty, location-shot realism and social undercurrents in the noir genre. His career halted in the United States after he joined the Communist Party in the 1930s—leaving in 1939 following the Nazi-Soviet pact—and refused to affirm or deny membership or name associates during House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, leading to his blacklisting in the 1950s.

Exiled to Europe from 1953, Dassin directed Rififi (1955) in France, earning the Best Director award at Cannes for its innovative silent heist sequence, and later Never on Sunday (1960) in Greece, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. He married Greek actress Melina Mercouri in 1966, collaborating with her on films like Topkapi (1964), and settled in Athens in the 1970s, where he remained active in theater until his death from flu complications.

In brief

Julius "Jules" Dassin ( DASS-in, dass-IN; December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008) was an American film and theatre director, producer, writer and actor. A subject of the Hollywood blacklist, he subsequently moved to France, and later Greece, where he continued his career. He was best-known for his noir and crime films, though he also worked in other genres.

He won the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival for his pioneering heist film Rififi, and received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Never on Sunday (1960). He adapted Never on Sunday into the stage musical Illya Darling, earning Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical. Dassin's other notable films included Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Thieves' Highway (1949), Night and the City (1950), Topkapi (1964), and Uptight (1968).