Oct 24, 2022
Joseph L. Mankiewicz Career Summation
Occupational Inheritance: No; brother writer, Herman
Nationality: US; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; when he was 4, family moved to NYC
Social Class:
Race/Ethnicity:
Family:
Formal Education: Stuyvesant High School, NY
Training:
First Film: Dragonwyck (1946), which he also wrote; age 37; but was already accomplished writer and producer (Philadelphia Story)
Breakthrough: Letter to Three Wives, 1949; his 3rd film; age 40
First Oscar Nomination: As director, Letter to Three Wives
Gap between First Film and First Nom: 1946-1949; 3 years
Other Oscars:
Other Oscar Nominations:
Oscar Awards:
Nominations Span:
Genre (specialties): satires (also musical; western)
Collaborators:
Last Film: Sleuth, 1972; age 63
Contract:
Career Length: as director, 1946-1972; 26 years
Career Output: 22 films (including one for TV)
Marriage:
Politics:
Death: 1993; 83
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (February 11, 1909–February 5, 1993) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won consecutive Oscars for both Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), the latter of which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six.
Comfortable in various genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylized mise en scène.
Mankiewicz worked for 17 years as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and as a producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century Fox.
Over six years he made 11 films for Fox.
During his over 40-year career in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote 48 screenplays.
He also produced more than 20 films, including The Philadelphia Story which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1941.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish emigrants from Germany.
He had a sister, Erna Mankiewicz (1901–1979), and a brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897–1953), a screenwriter, who also won Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane (1941).
At age 4, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City, graduating in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School.
Mankiewicz got work at the UFA film studio translating film intertitles from German to English.
Helped by Brother Herman
In 1928 Mankiewicz got a contract to work as writer at Paramount, through his brother Herman. Herman was one of the writers on The Dummy (1929), on which Mankiewicz wrote titles.
He also did titles for Close Harmony (1929) and The Man I Love (1929) with Jack Oakie, The Studio Murder Mystery (1929), Thunderbolt (1929), The River of Romance (1929), The Saturday Night Kid (1929) with Clara Bow, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), and The Virginian (1929) with Gary Cooper.
Mankiewicz started to be credited on screenplays for films like Fast Company (1929) with Oakie and Slightly Scarlet (1930). He did work on the script for The Light of Western Stars (1930) with Richard Arlen and Paramount on Parade (1930).
Mankiewicz wrote The Social Lion (1930) with Oakie, Only Saps Work (1930), The Gang Buster (1931) with Arlen, Finn and Hattie (1931) with Oakie, and June Moon (1931) with Oakie.
He also did the scripts for Skippy (1931) with Jackie Cooper, Dude Ranch (1931) with Oakie, Newly Rich (1931), and Sooky (1931), a sequel to Skippy. This was followed by This Reckless Age (1932), Sky Bride (1932) with Arlen and Oakie, Million Dollar Legs (1932) with Oakie and W.C. Fields, Night After Night (1932) (uncredited), and If I Had a Million (1932). He was borrowed by RKO for Diplomaniacs (1933) and Emergency Call (1933). He returned to Paramount for Too Much Harmony (1933) with Oakie and Bing Crosby, Meet the Baron (1933) (uncredited), and the all-star Alice in Wonderland (1933).
From Paramount to MGM
Mankiewicz signed a long term contract with MGM. He wrote Manhattan Melodrama (1934) which was a huge hit.
He was loaned out to King Vidor to work on Our Daily Bread (1934).
At MGM he wrote Forsaking All Others (1934) with Gable, Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery and did uncredited work on After Office Hours (1935) with Gable and Constance Bennett, Reckless (1935) with Jean Harlow and William Powell, Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) and I Live My Life (1935) with Crawford.
Producer: 1936; age 27
Mankiewicz was promoted to producer with Three Godfathers (1936). On most of his films as producer he would work uncredited on the script. Mankiewicz had commercial and critical success with Fury (1936), the first American film directed by Fritz Lang.
Mankiewicz produced a series of films starring Joan Crawford: The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), Love on the Run (1936), The Bride Wore Red (1937), and Mannequin (1937).
Mankewicz also produced Double Wedding (1937) with William Powell and Myrna Loy; Three Comrades (1938), with Margaret Sullavan and Robert Taylor and director Frank Borzage, famously rewriting F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Shopworn Angel (1938) with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart; The Shining Hour (1938) with Sullavan and Crawford, directed by Borzage. He did some uncredited writing on The Great Waltz (1938), and the script which became The Pirate (1948).
He produced A Christmas Carol (1938); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) with Mickey Rooney; and Strange Cargo (1940) with Gable and Crawford, directed by Borzage.
He had a huge hit with The Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. It was followed by The Wild Man of Borneo (1941), and The Feminine Touch (1941), then he had another big success with Hepburn, Woman of the Year (1942), her first teaming with Spencer Tracy.
Mankiewicz’s final productions at MGM were Cairo (1942) with Jeanette MacDonald and Reunion in France (1942) with Crawford and John Wayne.
20th Century Fox
Mankiewicz received an offer at Fox, which included the right to direct. His first film for the studio was The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), which he wrote with Nunnally Johnson and produced. It co starred his wife Rose Stradner.
Mankiewicz made his directorial debut with Dragonwyck (1946), which he also wrote; Gene Tierney and Vincent Price starred.
Collaborator: Scripter Philip Dunne
He followed it with Somewhere in the Night (1946) a film noir which he co wrote. He worked as director only on The Late George Apley (1947) with Ronald Colman, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1948) with Tierney and Rex Harrison, and Escape (1948) with Harrison.
All were based on scripts by Philip Dunne.
Mankiewicz had huge success with A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which he wrote and directed, winning Oscars for both; Sol Siegel produced.
He and Siegel collaborated again on House of Strangers (1949), on which Mankiewicz did some uncredited writing.
Mankewicz wrote and directed No Way Out (1950), which launched the career of Sidney Poitier; Darryl F. Zanuck was producer. Zanuck also took that credit on Mankiewicz’s next film, All About Eve (1950), which quickly became a classic.
Mankewicz then made People Will Talk (1951), also produced by Zanuck, though not highly acclaimed.
He did some uncredited work on the script for I’ll Never Forget You (1952), then made one last film under his contract with Fox, 5 Fingers (1952).
Independent
In 1951, Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialized, he continued to make films (both for his production company Figaro and as director-for-hire).
Recurrent Themes:
They explored his favorite themes: the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance, and the clash between people’s urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.
In 1953, he directed Julius Caesar for MGM, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play produced by John Houseman. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, in The Story of Cinema, described it as a “film of quiet excellence, faltering only in the later moments when budget restrictions hampered the handling of the battle sequences”.
The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony, and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
Figaro
Mankiewicz set up his own production company, Figaro. Its first production was The Barefoot Contessa (1954) which Mankiewicz wrote, produced and directed; it starred Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner.
Sam Goldwyn hired him to write and direct the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955). This was a huge hit but not highly regarded critically. Brando starred with Frank Sinatra and Jean Simmons.
In 1958, Mankiewicz wrote and directed The Quiet American for Figaro, an adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1955 novel about the seed of American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, under pressure from the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, distorted the message of Greene’s book, changing major parts of the story to appeal to a nationalistic audience. A cautionary tale about America’s blind support for “anti-Communists” was turned into, according to Greene, a “propaganda film for America.” The film was a critical and commercial disappointment.
That year Figaro produced I Want to Live! (1958) though Mankiewicz had little to do with it.
He directed Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) for producer Sam Spiegel, from a script by Gore Vidal and a play by Tennessee Williams. Elizabeth Taylor, Hepburn and Montgomery Clift starred. It was a big hit.
Cleopatra
20th Century Fox were looking for a director for Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. She would only approve two men, George Stevens or Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz accepted a lucrative contract, which he came to regret. The film consumed two years of Mankiewicz’s life and ended up both derailing his career and causing financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, which were not fully recovered until Rodgers and Hammerstein’s popular The Sound of Music was released two years later.
Later career
Mankiewicz produced and directed Carol for Another Christmas (1964) for TV.
He wrote and directed The Honey Pot (1967) for Charles K. Feldman and produced and directed There Was a Crooked Man… (1970), as well as doing some uncredited work on the documentary King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis (1970).
Mankiewicz garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth, his final directing effort, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.
In 1983, he was a member of the jury at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.
He was the younger brother of Herman J. Mankiewicz. His sons are Eric Reynal (from his first marriage), writer-director Tom Mankiewicz, and producer Christopher Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alex Mankiewicz. His great-nephews are radio and TV personality Ben Mankiewicz, who currently can be seen on TCM, and reporter Josh Mankiewicz , of NBC News. He also was the uncle of Frank Mankiewicz, a political campaign manager who officially announced the death of the assassinated presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968.
Mankiewicz died of a heart attack on February 5, 1993, six days before his 84th birthday. He was interred in Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Churchyard cemetery in Bedford, New York.
Filmography
1946
Dragonwyck 20th Century Fox Gene Tierney / Vincent Price
Somewhere in the Night Richard Conte, John Hodiak, Nancy Guild
1947
The Late George Apley Ronald Colman
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders
1948 Escape Rex Harrison / Peggy Cummins / William Hartnell
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Jeanne Crain / Linda Darnell / Ann Sothern
House of Strangers. Edward G. Robinson, Susan Hayward, Richard Conte
1950
No Way Out Richard Widmark / Sidney Poitier / Linda Darnell
All About Eve Bette Davis / Anne Baxter / George Sanders
1951
People Will Talk Cary Grant / Jeanne Crain / Hume Cronyn
1952 5 Fingers James Mason / Danielle Darrieux
1953 Julius Caesar Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Marlon Brando / James Mason / John Gielgud
1954 The Barefoot Contessa; Figaro/United Artists; Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner; Technicolor film
1955 Guys and Dolls Samuel Goldwyn/MGM; Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra; Eastmancolor film
1958 The Quiet American Figaro / United Artists, Audie Murphy Michael Redgrave, Graham Greene
1959 Suddenly, Last Summer Columbia Elizabeth Taylor / Montgomery Clift / Katharine Hepburn Tennessee Williams
1963 Cleopatra 20th Century Fox Elizabeth Taylor / Richard Burton / Rex Harrison DeLuxe film
1964 A Carol for Another Christmas ABC Sterling Hayden / Peter Sellers TV Movie
1967 The Honey Pot Famous Artists Productions, Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward, Maggie Smith; Technicolor film
1970 King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis Commonwealth United Entertainment Co-directed with Sidney Lumet; Documentary
There Was a Crooked Man… Warner; Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Hume Cronyn; Technicolor film
1972: Sleuth, Palomar Pictures Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine; Color film
Writer
Fast Company (1929) co-writer
Slightly Scarlet (1930) co-writer
Paramount on Parade (1930)
The Social Lion (1931) adaptation
Only Saps Work (1931) co-writer
The Gang Buster (1931)
Finn and Hattie (1931)
June Moon (1931) co-writer
Skippy (1931) co-writer
Newly Rich (1931) co-writer
Sooky (1931) co-writer
This Reckless Age (1932) co-writer
Sky Bride (1932) co-writer
Million Dollar Legs (1932) story
If I Had A Million (1932) (segments “China Shop”, “Three Marines”, “Violet”) uncredited
Diplomaniacs (1933) co-writer
Emergency Call (1933) co-writer
Too Much Harmony (1933) story
Alice in Wonderland (1933) co-writer
Manhattan Melodrama (1934) co-writer
Our Daily Bread (1934) dialogue
Forsaking All Others (1934)
I Live My Life (1935)
The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) co-writer
Dragonwyck (1946)
Somewhere in the Night (1946) co-writer
A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
House of Strangers (1949) uncredited
No Way Out (1950) co-writer
All About Eve (1950)
People Will Talk (1951)
Julius Caesar (1953) uncredited
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
Guys and Dolls (1955)
The Quiet American (1958)
Cleopatra (1963) co-writer
The Honey Pot (1967)
Academy Awards
1931 Skippy Nominated Best Adapted Screenplay
1941 The Philadelphia Story Nominated Best Picture
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Director; Best Writing, Screenplay
1951 All About Eve Won Best Director; Won Best Writing, Screenplay
No Way Out Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1953 5 Fingers, Nominated Best Director
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Original Screenplay
1973 Sleuth Nominated Best Director
Directors Guild of America (DGA)
1949 A Letter to Three Wives Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1951 All About Eve Won Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1953 5 Fingers Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1954 Julius Caesar Nominated Outstanding Directorial Achievement
1981 Won Honorary Life Member Award
1986 Won Lifetime Achievement Award
Writers Guild of America (WGA)
1950 A Letter to Three Wives Won Best Written American Comedy
1951 All About Eve Won Best Written American Comedy
Nominated Best Written American Drama
No Way Out Nominated The Robert Meltzer Award
1952 People Will Talk Nominated Best Written American Comedy
1955 The Barefoot Contessa Nominated Best Written American Drama
1956 Guys and Dolls Nominated Best Written American Musical
1963 Won Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement
Directed Oscar Performances (Wins and Nominations)
12 Nominated Performances; 2 wins (male supp. actor)
Best Actor: 4
1953 Marlon Brando Julius Caesar Nominated
1963 Rex Harrison Cleopatra Nominated
1972 Michael Caine Sleuth Nominated
1972 Laurence Olivier Sleuth Nominated
Best Actress: 4
1950 Anne Baxter All About Eve Nominated
1950 Bette Davis All About Eve Nominated
1959 Katharine Hepburn Suddenly, Last Summer Nominated
1959 Elizabeth Taylor Suddenly, Last Summer Nominated
Best Supporting Actor: 2
1950 George Sanders All About Eve; Won
1954 Edmond O’Brien The Barefoot Contessa; Won
Best Supporting Actress: 2
1950 Celeste Holm, All About Eve, Nominated
1950 Thelma Ritter, All About Eve, Nominated
