John Huston (1906-1987) was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of actor Walter Huston and journalist Reah Gore Huston. As a teen he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he attended Lincoln High School. He dropped out to pursue boxing, then painting, studying the latter with Stanton MacDonald-Wright at the Art Students League of Los Angeles. Huston pursued acting in New York with the Provincetown Players in 1924. He started writing short stories and worked as a reporter for a New York newspaper. Huston came to Hollywood as a writer in the early 1930s, under contract first at Samuel Goldwyn, then at Universal.

From 1932 to 1937 he drifted around London, Paris, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Finding his niche as a writer at Warner Bros., Huston scripted JEZEBEL (1938) and HIGH SIERRA (1941), among other films. His directorial debut was THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), for which he also wrote the screenplay. His directing career was interrupted by service in the Army Signal Corps, where he directed three documentaries. Back at Warner Bros., Huston directed THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) and KEY LARGO (1948). During the HUAC investigation of Communism in Hollywood in the late 1940s, Huston was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. Eventually disenfranchised, he moved to Ireland in 1952 and became an Irish citizen in 1964, taking up residence in a mansion built on the ruins of a monastery.

Huston went on to direct such pictures as THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), MOULIN ROUGE (1952), MOBY DICK (1956), THE MISFITS (1961), FREUD (1962), THE BIBLE (1966), THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), WISE BLOOD (1979), UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984), and PRIZZI'S HONOR (1985). His last film was THE DEAD (1987). As an actor Huston has appeared in THE CARDINAL (1963), CHINATOWN (1974), WISE BLOOD, and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, among other films. Huston's children, Anjelica, Danny, and Tony, have all found work in acting and directing. John Huston received Academy Awards for writing and directing THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. His other dozen nominations span five decades and three categories (writing, directing, and acting).

Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was born February 11, 1909, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Franz and Johanna Mankiewicz, who had emigrated from Germany in 1892. His father was an editor of German language newspapers, first in Pennsylvania, then in New York, and would later become an associate professor of education at City College of New York and a president of the Association of German Teachers of New York and Vicinity. Joseph had two older siblings, his sister, Erna, and his brother, Herman, who would later establish himself as a screenwriter and a renowned wit.

He graduated from Columbia College in 1928 and travelled to Germany to attend the University of Berlin. He instead found work translating intertitles at the German film studio UFA and as a correspondent in the Berlin offices of the “Chicago Tribune.” In 1929 he returned to the United States and joined Herman at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. He wrote intertitles for silent films and later, when the studio transitioned to sound, he wrote screenplays for W. C. Fields and Jack Oakie, among others. During his time at Paramount, he earned an Academy Award nomination for co-writing “Skippy” (1931) and helped found the Screen Writers Guild in 1933. By 1934 he had moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he co-wrote “Manhattan Melodrama” (1934), the first film to pair William Powell and Myrna Loy, and did uncredited script work on several Joan Crawford pictures. Though his goal was to direct, he was persuaded to try producing first. His notable producing credits at MGM include “Fury” (1936), Fritz Lang’s first American production; “Three Comrades” (1938), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s only on-screen credit for screenwriting; “The Philadelphia Story” (1940); and “Woman of the Year” (1942).

Frustrated at not being given the opportunity to direct at MGM, Mankiewicz went to Twentieth-Century-Fox in 1943. He co-wrote and produced “Keys of the Kingdom” (1944), co-starring his wife, Rose Stradner, before taking over directing duties from an ailing Ernst Lubitsch on “Dragonwyck” (1946). Following his directorial debut, he directed several films in succession at Fox, including “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (1947), before writing and directing “A Letter to Three Wives” (1949). He won Academy Awards for best director and best screenplay for the film, and the following year was nominated for co-writing “No Way Out” (1950), which he also directed, and for writing and directing “All About Eve” (1950). He won both awards for “All About Eve,” and remains the only filmmaker to win both best director and best screenplay Academy Awards for two years in a row. In the midst of this success, he also served as President of the Screen Directors Guild from 1950 to 1951, and faced an attempted recall of his position, instigated by Cecil B. DeMille, following Mankiewicz’s refusal to introduce a non-Communist loyalty oath for all Guild members.

In 1951, after the completion of his contract with Fox, Mankiewicz and his family relocated to New York, where he staged “La Boheme” at the Metropolitan Opera the following year. Though he briefly returned to MGM to adapt and direct “Julius Caesar” (1953) at the request of John Houseman, he did not sign a long-term contract with any studio for nearly a decade. That same year, he formed an independent production company, Figaro, Inc., a short-lived venture that ultimately produced Mankiewicz’s own “The Barefoot Contessa,” based on his original screenplay, and “The Quiet American,” loosely adapted from Graham Greene’s novel, as well as Robert Wise’s “I Want to Live!” (1958), co-written by Don Mankiewicz. During this period he also adapted and directed the Samuel Goldwyn Production of the Broadway hit “Guys and Dolls” (1955) and directed Gore Vidal’s and Tennessee Williams’ adaptation of Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959).

Mankiewicz returned to Twentieth Century-Fox in 1960 with the intention of condensing and adapting Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” novels into one film. He was soon conscripted to rescue Fox’s troubled production of “Cleopatra” (1963), an exhausting endeavor that took two years to complete and stalled his heretofore prolific output. His sporadic productivity over the next several years included “The Honey Pot” (1967), “There Was a Crooked Man. . . ” (1970), and “Sleuth” (1972), for which he received his fourth and final Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Though he continued to develop projects for the next decade, “Sleuth” was his last produced film. He died February 5, 1993, just shy of his 84th birthday.