Theater

PROMINENT STAGE AND SCREEN ARTISTS

A century of theater-film interaction has seen many stage-trained directors, writers, and performers whose motion pictures bear the traces of their theatrical experience and sensibilities. In the silent period, David Wark Griffith quit the life of an itinerant player to score a spectacular success in the burgeoning film industry with smash hits The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Way Down East (1920) (both based on stage plays) in America. Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjostrom (1879–1960) quit the stage to make popular films like Erotikon (1920) and K̈ orkarlen ( The Phantom Carriage , 1921), respectively, for the Svenskfilmindustri in Sweden. Maurice Tourneur (1876–1961) left the French independent theater entrepreneur André Antoine (1858–1943) to come to America and direct the Mary Pickford vehicles The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and The Pride of the Clan (1917). After working with Max Reinhardt's (1873–1943) Deutsches Theater, Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) emigrated to America where he inaugurated the modern sophisticated sex farce with The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windemere's Fan (1925). Sergei Eisenstein's experience with Vsevelod Meyerhold and the Moscow Art Theatre led to his revolutionary agit-prop films like Bronenosets Potyomkin ( Battleship Potemkin , 1925).

The coming of sound brought to the screen a fresh crop of stage-trained directors who went on to make many popular films either adapted from plays or at least consistently displaying a theatrical sensibility. Some, like George Cukor (1899–1983) and James Whale (1896–1957), turned their backs on the stage in 1929 and devoted the rest of their careers to cinema. Others moved with equal success between theater and film. Rouben Mamoulian shifted effortlessly from premiere Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! to cinematic classics Applause (1929), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and Love Me Tonight (1932). Orson Welles's (1915–1985) notoriety with the Mercury Theater productions in the mid-1930s led to an invitation from RKO to Hollywood, where, in addition to directing the groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941) he made several Shakespearean adaptations, including Macbeth (1948) and The Tragedy of Othello (1952). After co-founding the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and instituting its famous "method" acting techniques, Elia Kazan (1909–2003) directed some of his greatest stage success for the screen, notably A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Sidney Lumet's (b. 1924) background in New York's Yiddish Art Theatre led to directing television dramas in the early

1950s and his breakthrough film, Twelve Angry Men (1957).

In England, the success of the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s spurred Tony Richardson (1928–1991), Karel Reisz (1926–2002), and Lindsay Anderson (1923–1994) to bring to the screen adaptations of plays by a new generation of playwrights of the time, such as Look Back in Anger (1958) and The Entertainer (1960), by quintessential "angry young man" John Osborne (1929–1994). In Italy, before he directed the landmark Ladri di biciclette ( The Bicycle Thieves , 1948), Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974) was a popular stage actor—a profession he continued to practice between subsequent directing assignments. Similarly, actor Laurence Olivier (1907–1989) not only enjoyed a long career in the movies and also brought Shakepeare's Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955) to the screen. More recently, Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960) has continued Olivier's legacy with a dual career in theater and film, directing Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993). Italians Luchino Visconti (1906–1976) and Franco Zeffirelli (b. 1923) have maintained dual careers in opera and film, occasionally bringing their own stage versions to the screen. And, of course, in Sweden Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) continued to work steadily in theater, opera, and film. His film adaptation of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975) remains one of cinema's most transcendent theatrical adaptations.

Many of today's foremost playwrights have also worked extensively, with varying degrees of success, in both theater and film. Clifford Odets (1906–1963), the best known of America's social protest playwrights in the 1930s, shifted uneasily between Harold Clurman's Group Theatre, for which he wrote Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! (both 1935), and Hollywood. Although well paid for his film scripts for None but the Lonely Heart (1944), Humoresque (1946), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), he hated his work in cinema. However, his Hollywood experiences did inspire one of his strongest plays, The Big Knife (1949), which was adapted to the screen in 1955 by Robert Aldrich. In England, Harold Pinter (b. 1930), John Osborne (1929–1994), David Hare (b. 1947), and Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) have written many screenplays, including adaptations of their own works—respectively, Butley (1974), Look Back in Anger (1958), Plenty (1985), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). The American playwright who most parallels their careers is David Mamet (b. 1947), who has directed several original screenplays, including House of Games (1987) and his own adaptations of classic plays, such as Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (1999). Two stage-trained directors, Sam Mendes (b. 1965) and Julie Taymor(b. 1952), have demonstrated a distinctive flair for the cinema, respectively, directing the Oscar ^® -winning feature American Beauty (1999) and Titus (2000), a wildly post-modernist adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus .

Undaunted by the restrictions of the proscenium stage and wholly cinematic in their vision of the theatrical translation to film, these new directors and writers were poised at the beginning of the twenty-first century to carry forward the tradition of intelligent dramatic adaptation. Doubtless, the advancements of 3-D and digital technology will bring new challenges to the process that will continue to redefine the very nature of that relationship.