A Breath of Scandal

Michael Curtiz was an Academy award winning Hungarian-American film director. He had early credits as Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertész. He directed more than fifty films in Europe and more than one hundred in the United States, many of them cinema classics, including The... Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Dodge City, The Sea Hawk, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s. He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death. Curtiz was born Kertész Kaminer Manó to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary . He claimed to have been born December 24, 1886.
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Vittorio De Sica was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement. In his career, four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette were awarded honorary Oscars, while ieri, oggi, domani and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the... Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Oscar. These two films generally are considered part of the canon of classic cinema. Ladri di biciclette was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history. Ironically, for an artist considered one of the Italian cinema's greatest and most influential directors, De Sica's sole Academy Award nomination was for acting, when he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop.
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