The Longest Day

Kenneth Cooper Annakin, OBE was an English film director. Annakin grew up in Beverley, Yorkshire where he attended the local school. He began his career in feature films following an early experience making documentaries. His first filmwork was in 1947 with the Rank Organisation. The following... year he moved to Gainsborough Pictures to direct three films about the Huggetts, a working class family living in suburban England these highly successful films starring Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Petula Clark and Diana Dors are seen as the genesis of the British soap opera. Annakin became known for a series of Walt Disney adventures including The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men , The Sword and the Rose , Third Man on the Mountain , and Swiss Family Robinson . He was later associated with another American producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, when he was hired to direct the British segments in The Longest Day . As head of the 20th Century-Fox Studio, Zanuck endorsed Annakin's most ambitious project Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines .
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Andrew Marton was a Hungarian-American director, producer and editor. In his career he directed 39 films and television programs solo, and 16 as an assistant director. After high-school graduation in 1922 he was taken by Alfréd Deésy to Vienna to work at Sascha-Film, mostly as an assistant editor.... After a few months, he rose the attention of director Ernst Lubitsch, who convinced him to try his luck in Hollywood. Marton returned to Europe in 1927, and worked as the main editor of the Tobis company in Berlin, and later as an assistant director in Vienna. He directed his first feature film, Two O'Clock in the Morning in 1929 in Great Britain. Following his famed adventurous spirit, he joined a German expedition to Tibet in 1934, where he filmed his emblematic movie, Der Demon des Himalaya. After returning to Hungary, he directed his only Hungarian movie in 1935 in Budapest. Between 1936-1939 he worked with Alexander Korda in London. After the outbreak of World War II, he moved to the USA for good. During the 1940s and 1950s he worked mostly for MGM Studios. In 1954 he founded his own production company with Iván Törzs, Louis Meyer and László Benedek. He was active until the middle of the 1970s. On January 7, 1992 he died of pneumonia.
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Bernhard Wicki was an Austrian actor and film director. Wicki studied in the city of Breslau such topics as Art History, History und German Literature. In 1938, he transferred to the Schauspielschule des Staatlichen Schauspielhauses in Berlin. In 1939, because of his membership in the... Bündischen Jugend he was imprisoned for many months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After his release he moved to Vienna, and then in 1944 to Switzerland. After the end of World War II, he starred in many films, like Die letzte Brücke and Es geschah am 20. Juli . He was also a photographer. His first attempt at directing came three years later with the documentary Warum sind sie gegen uns? . He became internationally famous with his anti-war film of 1959 called Die Brücke, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1961, he won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival for his film The Miracle of Father Malachia. After his death in 2001, a fund was started and named after him in Munich, the Bernhard Wicki Memorial Fund.
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Darryl Francis Zanuck was an American producer, writer, actor, director and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors . He earned three Academy Awards during his tenure. Zanuck was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, the son of Louise Torpin and... Frank Zanuck, who owned and operated a hotel in Wahoo. Zanuck was of part Swiss descent and was raised a Protestant. At six, Zanuck and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where the better climate could improve her poor health. At eight, he found his first movie job as an extra, but his disapproving father recalled him to Nebraska. In 1918, despite being sixteen, he deceived a recruiter and joined the United States Army and served in France with the Nebraska National Guard. Returning to the U.S., he worked in many part-time jobs while he tried to find work as a writer. He managed to find work producing movie plots, selling his first story in 1922 to William Russell and his second to Irving Thalberg. He then worked for Mack Sennett and took that experience to Warner Bros.
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