| Jean Negulesco | |
| Birth Name: | Ioan Negulescu |
| Birth Place: | Craiova, Dolj, Romania |
| Death Date: | 18 July 1993 (aged 93) |
| Death Place: | Marbella, Andalusia, Spain |
| Occupation: | Artist, film director, screenwriter, film producer |
| Years Active: | 1918–1970 |
| Spouse: | |
| Children: | 2 |
Jean Negulesco (born Ioan Negulescu; – 18 July 1993) was a Romanian-American film director and screenwriter.[1] He first gained notice for his film noirs and later made such notable films as Johnny Belinda (1948), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Titanic (1953), and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).[2]
He was called "the first real master of CinemaScope".[3]
Born in Craiova, Negulesco was the son of a hotel keeper and attended Carol I High School.
When he was 15, he was working in a military hospital during World War I. George Enescu, the Romanian composer, came to play the violin to the war wounded; Negulesco drew a portrait of him, and Enesco bought it. Negulesco decided to be a painter and studied art in Bucharest.[4]
Negulesco went to Paris in 1920, and enrolled in the Académie Julian. He sold one of his paintings to Rex Ingram.[5]
In 1927, he visited New York City for an exhibition of his paintings and settled there.[4]
He then made his way to California, at first working as a portraitist.[6]
He became interested in movies and made an experimental feature film, financed as well as written and directed by himself, called Three and a Day. Through his contact with the film's star, Mischa Auer, he managed to get a job at Paramount.[7]
He did the opening montage for the film musical Tonight We Sing and worked on The Story of Temple Drake and A Farewell to Arms (1932).[7]
He worked his way to assistant producer, second unit director.[1]
Negulesco went to Warner Brothers in 1940. He made his reputation at Warner Bros by directing short subjects, particularly a series of band shorts featuring unusual camera angles and dramatic use of shadows and silhouettes.
Negulesco's first feature film as director was Singapore Woman (1941). In 1948, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for Johnny Belinda.
In 1948 Negulesco went to work for 20th Century Fox. He was the first director to make two films in Fox's CinemaScope - How to Marry a Millionaire and Three Coins in the Fountain;[8] the former receiving a nomination for a BAFTA Award for Best Film.[9]
His 1959 movie The Best of Everything was on Entertainment Weeklys Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time.
During his Hollywood career and in his 1984 autobiography Things I Did and Things I Think I Did, Negulesco claimed to have been born on 29 February 1900; he apparently was motivated to make this statement because birthdays on leap year day are comparatively rare (and even though 1900 was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, it was under the Julian calendar, which applied in Romania at that time).
He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6212 Hollywood Blvd.
From the late 1960s Negulesco lived in Marbella, Spain, where he died, at age 93, of heart failure. He is buried in the Virgen del Carmen cemetery in Marbella.[10]
Many of Negulesco's home movies are held by the Academy Film Archive; the archive has preserved a number of them, including behind-the-scenes footage of Negulesco's films.[11]