Sep 16, 2020
William Wellman Career Summary
Occupational Inheritance:
Social Class:
Nationality: US
Formal Education:
Training:
First Film:
First Oscar Nomination: Star Is Born, 1937; age 41
Other Nominations: 3 for Best Director
Oscar Awards: winner for Story Oscar, Star Is Born, 1937
Nominations Span: 1937-1954; 17 years
Genre (specialties): action, war, adventure; also comedies
Collaborators:
Last Film: Lafayette Escadrille, 1958; age 62
Contract:
Career Output: over 80 films
Career Span:
Marriage: actress
Politics:
Retirement:
Death: 1975; age 79
William Augustus Wellman (February 29, 1896) was an American film director notable for his work in crime, adventure and action genre films, often focusing on his passion for aviation themes. He also directed several well-regarded satirical comedies.
Beginning his film career as an actor, he directed over 80 films, at times co-credited as producer. In 1927, Wellman directed Wings, which became the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar. He also won the Academy Award for Best Story for his film A Star Is Born.
Wellman was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, Arthur Gouverneur Wellman, was a Boston Brahmin. William was a five times great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman, who immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1640.
He was also a great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis of New York, one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Wellman’s much-beloved mother, Cecilia McCarthy, was an Irish immigrant.
Wellman was expelled from Newton High School in Newtonville, Massachusetts, for dropping a stink bomb on the principal’s head. His mother was a probation officer who was asked to address Congress on the subject of juvenile delinquency. Wellman worked as a salesman and then at a lumber yard, and then played professional ice hockey, which is where he was first seen by Douglas Fairbanks, who suggested that with Wellman’s good looks he could become a film actor.
In World War I, Wellman enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps as an ambulance driver. While in Paris, Wellman joined the French Foreign Legion and was assigned on December 3, 1917 as a fighter pilot and the first American to join N.87 escadrille in the Lafayette Flying Corps, where he earned himself the nickname “Wild Bill” and received the Croix de Guerre with two palms.
N.87, les Chats Noir (Black Cat Group) was stationed at Lunéville in the Alsace-Lorraine sector and was equipped with Nieuport 17 and later Nieuport 24 “pursuit” aircraft. Wellman’s combat experience culminated in three recorded “kills”, along with five probables, although he was ultimately shot down by German anti-aircraft fire on March 21, 1918.Wellman survived the crash but he walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.
Maréchal des Logis (Sergeant) Wellman received a medical discharge from the Foreign Legion and returned to the United States a few weeks later. He spoke at War Savings Stamp rallies in his French uniform. In September 1918 his book about French flight school and his eventful four months at the front, titled Go Get ‘Em! (written by Wellman with the help of Eliot Harlow Robinson), was published. He joined the United States Army Air Service but too late to fly for America in the war. Stationed at Rockwell Field, he taught combat tactics to new pilots.
While in San Diego, Wellman flew to Hollywood for the weekends in his Spad fighter, using Fairbanks’ polo field in Bel Air as a landing strip. Fairbanks was fascinated with the true-life adventures of “Wild Bill” and promised to recommend him for a job in the movie business; he was responsible for Wellman being cast in the juvenile lead of The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919). Wellman was hired for the role of a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but was fired for slapping the leading lady, the actress Miriam Cooper, who happened to be the wife of director Raoul Walsh.
Wellman hated being an actor, thinking it an “unmanly” profession, and was miserable watching himself on screen while learning the craft. He soon switched to working behind the camera, aiming to be a director, and progressed up the line as “a messenger boy, as an assistant cutter, an assistant property man, a property man, an assistant director, second unit director and eventually… director.” His first assignment as an assistant director for Bernie Durning provided him with a work ethic that he adopted for future film work. One strict rule that Durning enforced was no fraternization with screen femme fatales, which almost immediately Wellman broke, leading to a confrontation and a thrashing from the director. Despite his transgression, both men became lifelong friends, and Wellman steadily progressed to more difficult first unit assignments.
Directing Debut
Wellman made his uncredited directorial debut in 1920 at Fox with The Twins of Suffering Creek. The first films he was credited with directing were The Man Who Won and Second Hand Love, released on the same day in 1923. After directing a dozen low-budget ‘horse opera’ films, Wellman was hired by Paramount in 1927 to direct Wings, a major war drama dealing with fighter pilots during World War I that was highlighted by air combat and flight sequences. The film culminates with the epic Battle of Saint-Mihiel. In the 1st Academy Awards it was one of two films to win Best Picture (the other was Sunrise), although, due to tensions within the studio regarding time and budget overages, Wellman wasn’t invited to the event.
Wellman’s other notable films include The Public Enemy (1931), the first version of A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), the 1939 version of Beau Geste starring Gary Cooper, Thunder Birds (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Lady of Burlesque (1943), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Battleground (1949) and two films starring and co-produced by John Wayne, Island in the Sky (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954).
Wellman also produced 10 films, one of them uncredited, all of which he also directed. His last film was Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which he produced, directed, wrote the story for and narrated. He wrote the screenplay for two other films that he directed, and one film that he did not direct: 1936’s The Last Gangster.
A Star Is Born
He also wrote the story for A Star Is Born and received a story credit for its remakes in 1954, 1976, and 2018.
Wellman worked fast, usually satisfied with a shot after one or two takes. Despite his reputation for not coddling his leading men and women, he coaxed Oscar-nominated performances from seven actors: Fredric March and Janet Gaynor (A Star Is Born), Brian Donlevy (Beau Geste), Robert Mitchum (The Story of G.I. Joe), James Whitmore (Battleground), and Jan Sterling and Claire Trevor (The High and Mighty). Regarding actors, Wellman stated in a 1952 interview “Movie stardom isn’t about acting ability, it’s personality and temperament,” and added “I once directed Clara Bow. She was mad and crazy but what a personality!”
Wings led to several firsts in filmmaking including newly invented camera mounts that could be secured to plane fuselages and motor-driven cameras to shoot actors while flying as the cameramen ducked out of frame in their cockpits. Star Richard Arlen had some flying experience but co-star Buddy Rogers had to learn to fly for the film, as stunt pilots could not be used during close-up shots. Towers up to 100 feet were used to shoot low-flying planes and battle action on the ground.
During the filming of Beggars of Life, a silent film starring Wallace Beery, Richard Arlen and Louise Brooks, sound was added to Beery’s introductory scene at the behest of Paramount Studio. Wellman reportedly hung a microphone from a broom so Beery could walk and talk within the scene, avoiding the static shot required for early sound shoots. During the filming of Chinatown Nights, he sat under the camera on a dolly with the mic between his legs, essentially inventing a shotgun mic.
Oscar Nominations and Awards
Wellman won a single Oscar, for the story of A Star Is Born.
He was nominated as best director three times: for A Star Is Born, Battleground and The High and Mighty, for which he was also nominated by the Directors Guild of America as best director.
In 1973, the DGA honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wellman revealed near the end of his life that he had married a French woman named Renee during his time in The Lafayette Flying Corps. She was killed in a bombing raid during the war. He was married four times in the U.S.:
Helene Chadwick: married (1918-1923) separated after a month; later divorced
Margery Chapin (daughter of Frederic Chapin): married (1925-1926); together for a short time; adopted Robert Emmett Tansey’s daughter, Gloria.
Marjorie Crawford: married (1930-1933) divorced Dorothy “Dottie” Coonan: married (March 20, 1934-1975); until his death; they had 7 children, 4 daughters, 3 sons.
William Wellman, Jr. wrote two books about his father, The Man and His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture (2006), and Wild Bill Wellman – Hollywood Rebel (2015).
William Wellman died in 1975 of leukemia.
His widow Dorothy Wellman died in 2009 in California at the age of 95.
Selected Filmography (incomplete)
The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) (Wellman’s debut as actor)
The Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) (first film as director, uncredited)
The Man Who Won (1923)
Second Hand Love (1923)
Big Dan (1923)
Cupid’s Fireman (1923)
The Vagabond Trail (1924)
Not a Drum Was Heard (1924)
The Circus Cowboy (1924)
When Husbands Flirt (1925)
The Boob (1926)
You Never Know Women (1926)
The Cat’s Pajamas (1926)
Wings (1927)
Ladies of the Mob (1928)
Beggars of Life (1928)
The Legion of the Condemned (1928)
Chinatown Nights (1929)
Woman Trap (1929)
The Man I Love (1929)
Young Eagles (1930)
Dangerous Paradise (1930)
Maybe It’s Love (1930)
The Public Enemy (1931)
Other Men’s Women (1931)
Night Nurse (1931)
The Star Witness (1931)
Safe in Hell (1931)
The Hatchet Man (1932)
So Big! (1932)
Frisco Jenny (1932)
The Purchase Price (1932)
Love Is a Racket (1932)
The Conquerors (1932)
Central Airport (1933)
Midnight Mary (1933)
Lilly Turner (1933)
Heroes for Sale (1933)
Wild Boys of the Road (1933)
College Coach (1933)
Viva Villa! (1934) (uncredited)
The President Vanishes (1934)
Stingaree (1934)
Looking for Trouble (1934)
The Call of the Wild (1935)
The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936)
Small Town Girl (1936)
Tarzan Escapes (1936) (uncredited)
A Star Is Born (also Story) (1937)
Nothing Sacred (1937)
Men with Wings (1938)
Beau Geste (1939)
The Light that Failed (1939)
Thunder Birds (1942)
Roxie Hart (1942)
The Great Man’s Lady (1942)
Lady of Burlesque (1943)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Buffalo Bill (1944)
This Man’s Navy (1945)
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
Gallant Journey (1946)
Magic Town (1947)
The Iron Curtain (1948)
Yellow Sky (1948)
Battleground (1949)
The Happy Years (1950)
The Next Voice You Hear… (1950)
Across the Wide Missouri (1951)
Westward the Women (1951)
My Man and I (1952)
Island in the Sky (Director + Narrator (Uncredited)) (1953)
The High and the Mighty (1954)
Track of the Cat (1954)
Ring of Fear (uncredited) (1954)
Blood Alley (1955)
Good-bye, My Lady (1956)
Darby’s Rangers (1958)
Lafayette Escadrille (1958)
