The Greatest Story Ever Told

George Stevens was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. Among his most notable films were Diary of Anne Frank , nominated for Best Director, Giant , winner of Oscar for Best Director, Shane , Oscar nominated, and A Place in the Sun , winner of Oscar for Best... Director. He was born in Oakland, California, and his family included his father Landers Stevens and his mother Georgie Cooper, both stage actors. His uncle was drama critic Ashton Stevens. He also had two brothers, Jack and writer Aston Stevens. He learned about the stage from his parents and worked and toured with them, on his way to filmmaking. He broke into the movie business as a cameraman, working on many Laurel and Hardy short films, such as Night Owls . His first feature film was The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble in 1933. In 1934 he got his first directing job, the slapstick Kentucky Kernels. His big break came when he directed Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams in 1935. He went on in the late 1930s to direct several Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies, not only with the two actors together, but on their own.
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Jean Negulesco was a Romanian-born American film director and screenwriter. Born in Craiova, he attended Carol I High School. In 1915 he moved to Vienna, in 1919 to Bucharest, where he worked as a painter, before becoming a stage decorator in Paris. In 1927 he went to New York City for an... exhibition of his paintings, and settled there. In 1934 he entered the film industry, first as a sketch artist, then as an assistant producer, second unit director and in the late 1930s he became a director and screenwriter. He made a reputation at Warner Brothers 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 . In 1948 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Directing for Johnny Belinda. In 1955, he won the BAFTA Award for Best Film for How to Marry a Millionaire. His 1959 movie, The Best of Everything, was on Entertainment Weekly's Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time list. From the late 1960s, he lived in Marbella, Spain where he died there at age 93, of heart failure.
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Sir David Lean, CBE was an English film director, producer, screenwriter and editor, best remembered for big-screen epics The Bridge on the River Kwai , Lawrence of Arabia , Doctor Zhivago , and A Passage to India ; for bringing Charles Dickens' novels to the silver screen with films such as Great... Expectations and Oliver Twist ; and for the renowned romantic drama Brief Encounter . Acclaimed by directors including Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick,, Lean was voted 9th greatest film director of all time in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound Directors' Top Directors" poll 2002. Lean has four films in the top eleven of the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films. David Lean was born in Croydon, Surrey , to Francis William le Blount Lean and the former Helena Tangye . His parents were Quakers and he was a pupil at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park School in Reading. His younger brother, Edward Tangye Lean , founded the original Inklings literary club when a student at Oxford University.
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