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(30 May 1896, Goshen, Indiana - 26
December 1977, Palm Springs, California)
 Howard
Winchester Hawks directed several classic Hollywood movies,
including Scarface (1932), His Girl Friday (1940) and Rio Bravo
(1959).
Born into a wealthy midwestern family, Hawks grew up in Indiana and
California and studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University
in New York. He served as a pilot in World War I and worked on
aircraft design before deciding on a career in Hollywood. He worked
his way up the production ladder, sold stories to Paramount studios
and financed a few movies of his own before making The Road to Glory
for Fox in 1926.
He went on to make movies for 45 more years, including the screwball
comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938, with Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn,
and a leopard named Baby) and Sergeant York (1941, starring Gary
Cooper). He also made the film versions of Ernest Hemingway's To
Have and Have Not (1944) and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946)
and the John Wayne westerns Red River (1948, with Montgomery Clift)
and Rio Lobo (1970, with Jennifer O'Neill).
Hawks was known as a versatile pro who could handle anything: he
wrote, directed and produced, and he had equal success with gangster
movies, romantic comedies, war stories and westerns. He always
maintained he made movies for entertainment alone, but in the 1950s
and '60s French film critics hailed him as one of the great cinema
auteurs and began a serious examination of his artistry. Hawks is
often ranked with Frank Capra and John Ford among the great
moviemakers of classic Hollywood.
Nominated for only one Oscar during his career (Sergeant York), Ford
was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1975. |
