[69] DeMille rented a barn to function as their film studio. Cecil B. DeMille real name: Cecil Blount DeMille Height: 5'11''(in feet & inches) 1.8034(m) 180.34(cm) , Birthdate(Birthday): August 12, 1881 , Age on January 21, 1959 (Death date): 77 Years 5 Months 9 Days Profession: Movies (Director), Also working as: Producer, Director, Editor, Screenwriter, Actor, Father: Henry Churchill de Mille, Mother: Matilda Beatrice deMille, Married: Yes, Children: Yes DeMille plays himself in the film. September 17, 1914. 72 pictures of Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille adored the art of Groesbeck, even hanging it above his fireplace, but film staff found it difficult to convert his art into three-dimensional sets. [6] He was the second of three children of Henry Churchill de Mille (September 4, 1853 February 10, 1893) and his wife Matilda Beatrice deMille (ne Samuel; January 30, 1853 October 8, 1923), known as Beatrice. Immediate Family: Biological son of Gus Gonzales and Ada Piper. DeMille had adopted him to avoid revealing the affairs to William's wife. He was eventually introduced to Oscar Apfel, a stage director who had been a director with the Edison Company. [27] Before Henry deMille's death, Beatrice had "enthusiastically supported" her husband's theatrical aspirations. . Cecil B. DeMille Net Worth: Cecil B. DeMille was an American film director and producer who had a net worth equal to $50 million at the time of his death after adjusting for . This was, according to DeMille, the lowest point of his career. [273], As a filmmaker, DeMille was the aesthetic inspiration of many directors and films due to his early influence during the crucial development of the film industry. [note 4], While filming The Captive in 1915, an extra, Bob Fleming, died on set when another extra failed to heed to DeMille's orders to unload all guns for rehearsal. [58], Desiring a change of scene, Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldfish (later Samuel Goldwyn), and a group of East Coast businessmen created the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1913 over which DeMille became director-general. Here is all you want to know, and more! DeMille's designs, most notably his design of the distinctive cadet parade uniform, won praise from Air Force and Academy leadership, were ultimately adopted, and are still worn by cadets. Stills. [39] DeMille wrote a few of his own plays in-between stage performances, but his playwriting was not as successful. [228] In order to attract a high-class audience, DeMille based many of his early films on stage melodramas, novels, and short stories. The Tikah still made a few trade canoes into the early 20th Century. Golden Globes 1953 - Best Director and Best . He was confined to bed and unable to eat. DeMille traveled abroad to find employment until he was offered a deal at Paramount. 77. Death: December 20, 1982 (68) Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, United States. He consistently was criticized for producing shallow films without talent or artistic care. [84] His specific use of lighting, influenced by his mentor David Belasco, was for the purpose of creating "striking images" and heightening "dramatic situations". The Union Pacific gave DeMille access to historical data, early period trains, and expert crews, adding to the authenticity of the film. Work period (start) 1899; Work period (end) 1959; Country of citizenship: Full name. Self - Actor, The F.B.I. Cecil B. DeMille didn't make the kind of movies that wind up in French film festivals. Finally, he would leave the script with artists and allow them to create artistic depictions and renderings of each scene. While visually appealing, this made the films appear more old-fashioned. [215][216][217] He also cast established stars such as Gary Cooper, Robert Preston, Paulette Goddard and Fredric March in multiple pictures. DeMille served as executive producer, overseeing producer Henry Wilcoxon. His art was even shown at Paramount meetings when pitching new films. This concerned the executives at Paramount; however, the film turned out to be the studio's highest-grossing film. She later became the second female play broker on Broadway. [194] DeMille was particularly adept at directing and managing large crowds in his films. [180] and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. However, DeMille's second remake at MGM in 1931 would be a failure. By 1930, DeMille had perfected his film style of mass-interest spectacle films with Western, Roman, or Biblical themes. Explore Cecil B. DeMille's biography, personal life, family and cause of death. He said he was rather against union leaders such as Walter Reuther and Harry Bridges whom he compared to dictators. Beatrice became a play broker and author's agent, influencing DeMille's early life and career. [107] Aside from The King of Kings, none of DeMille's films away from Paramount were successful. While he is known as DeMille (his nom d'oeuvre), his family name was Dutch and is usually spelled "de Mil". The actor had 10 Globes nominations and five wins, including a special award for his vocal work on . Date of Death: January 21, 1959. Biography. When the AFRA expanded to television, DeMille was banned from television appearances. He donated. Robin Williams won the Cecil B. DeMille Awards in 2005. Carl Laemmle anniversary 1931.JPG 1,473 1,161; 359 KB. A censorship board called the Hays Code was established. Actress and director Angelina Jolie is reportedly moving her six children with Brad Pitt into the historic estate once owned by legendary director Cecil B. DeMille who was famous for his over-the-t He is acknowledged as a founding father of the American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. [259] He cultivated the image of the omnipotent director,[260] complete with megaphone, riding crop, and jodhpurs. [306] DeMille received a Golden Globe Award for Best Director[314] and was additionally nominated for the Best Director category at the 1953 Academy Awards for the same film. In March 1938, he underwent a major emergency prostatectomy. [26] The aim of the school was to teach young women to properly understand and fulfill the women's duty to herself, her home, and her country. A dark, exotic beauty, Katherine DeMille was a fascinating screen presence in the 1930s and 1940s. Cecil B. DeMille's final film, another version of The Ten Commandments , is his most widely seen work, thanks to Easter-time television programming, but it is not one of his most respected. The gathering drew 93,000, with short speeches by, While the film was a huge success, DeMille regretted that he could not share the success with his wife who had developed, The estate cycled through several different homeowners for the next 30 years until it was bought by American actress. [181] Henry was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Kingsley whose ideas trickled down to DeMille. [252], Despite his box-office success, awards, and artistic achievements, DeMille has been dismissed and ignored by critics both during his life and posthumously. [154] In 1954, Secretary of the Air Force Harold E. Talbott asked DeMille for help in designing the cadet uniforms at the newly established United States Air Force Academy. However, he did take a few months to set up a movie theater for the French front. Consequently, DeMille's television and radio appearance ban lasted for the remainder of his life, though he was permitted to appear on radio or television to publicize a movie. [47] In 1907, due to a scandal with one of Beatrice's students, Evelyn Nesbit, the Henry deMille School lost students. Movie posters. Find out about Cecil B DeMille's family tree, family history, ancestry, ancestors, genealogy, relationships and affairs! Though the film was not high-grossing, it was well-received and DeMille was asked to shorten its running time to allow for more showings per day. [212] Paulette Goddard's refusal to risk personal injury in a scene involving fire in Unconquered cost her DeMille's favor and a role in The Greatest Show on Earth. Red carpet photos. Cecil B. DeMille: Film director from the United States (1881 - 1959), Actor, Writer, Film producer, Film director, Film editor, Screenwriter, Playwright, Stage actor . Epic. Still, the members unanimously approved it. [65] Already $15,000 in debt to Royle for the screenplay of The Squaw Man, Lasky's relatives bought the $5,000 stock to save the Lasky Company from bankruptcy. Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA. [101], After five years and thirty hit films, DeMille became the American film industry's most successful director. Groesbeck's art was circulated on set to give actors and crew members a better understanding of DeMille's vision. [275] Scorsese said he had viewed The Ten Commandments forty or fifty times. After the film was shown, viewers complained that the shadows and lighting prevented the audience from seeing the actors' full faces, complaining that they would only pay half price. Ben Gabbe/Getty. [168] In the months before his death, DeMille was researching a film biography of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement. Gender. His overriding spirit . William deMille would later convert from theater to Hollywood and would spend the rest of his career as a film director. [40], His brother William was establishing himself as a playwright and sometimes invited him to collaborate. After Henry DeMille's death at age 40, Cecil's mother, Beatrice, ran a well-known boarding school for girls in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. [33] They had met in a theater in Washington D.C. while they were both acting in Hearts Are Trumps. [46] Life was difficult for DeMille and his wife as traveling actors; however, traveling allowed him to experience part of the United States he had not yet seen. The King of Kings (1927) The first real film about Jesus Christ, this one also set up the template by which all others would be measured until 1988. Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12th, in 1881. [174] DeMille left his multi-million dollar estate in Los Feliz, Los Angeles in Laughlin Park to his daughter Cecilia because his wife had dementia and was unable to care for an estate. [173] After his death, notable news outlets such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian honored DeMille as "pioneer of movies", "the greatest creator and showman of our industry", and "the founder of Hollywood". Adams allowed DeMille to have several long term mistresses during their marriage as an outlet, while maintaining an outward appearance of a faithful marriage. His first three films were Westerns, and he filmed many Westerns throughout his career. [281] However, not everyone received DeMille's religious films favorably. [152] Art Arthur also interviewed people for the autobiography. The wedding party was small. [72] He made his first film run sixty minutes, as long as a short play. [208] DeMille had an authoritarian persona on set; he required absolute attention from the cast and crew. Eventually, he became manager of the agency and later, a junior partner with his mother. He had completely adapted to the production of sound film despite the film's poor dialogue. [229] He began the production of epics earlier in his career until they began to solidify his career in the 1920s. [232] In the early age of cinema, DeMille differentiated the Lasky Company from other production companies due to the use of dramatic, low-key lighting they called "Lasky lighting" and marketed as "Rembrandt lighting" to appeal to the public. Actor, The F.B.I. [60] In addition to directing, DeMille was the supervisor and consultant for the first year of films made by the Lasky Feature Play Company. Between 1913 and 1956, he made a total of 70 features, both silent and sound films.He is acknowledged as a founding father of the cinema of the United States and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. He was a Freemason who remained a member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York . Cecil B. DeMille, in full Cecil Blount DeMille, (born August 12, 1881, Ashfield, Massachusetts, U.S.died January 21, 1959, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture producer-director whose use of spectacle attracted vast audiences and made him a dominant figure in Hollywood for almost five decades. If you have diabetes and take insulin or other oral medications aimed to reduce blood sugar, taking chromium may increase the risk of . [127] However, according to DeMille himself, he was not anti-union and belonged to a few unions himself. According to director of photography Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg's earliest home movies still exist, and were consulted for the scene in "The Fabelmans" in which young Sammy Fabelman recreates a train crash scene from Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 film "The Greatest Show on Earth." "We've watched them before, but they are a little too primitive [] Profile of the Hollywood directing legend who became known for his "spectaculars." Learn how DeMille helped establish Hollywood as the movie-making capital o. The Captive (1915) $500 /week. His father, Henry Churchill de Mille (1853-1893), was a North Carolina-born dramatist and lay reader in the Episcopal Church, who had earlier . 1. Further illustrated by his home life, DeMille required formality and politeness at home. DeMille's trademark scenes included bathtubs, lion attacks, and Roman orgies. In the audience was Charles Frohman who would cast DeMille in his play Hearts are Trumps, DeMille's Broadway debut. "He was a thoroughly bad director," Huston said. [228] DeMille was often criticized for making his spectacles too colorful and for being too occupied with entertaining the audience rather than accessing the artistic and auteur possibilities that film could provide. The project was later completed by DeMille's former assistant director. [54] DeMille found success in the spring of 1913 producing Reckless Age by Lee Wilson, a play about a high society girl wrongly accused of manslaughter starring Frederick Burton and Sydney Shields. Additionally, during the war, DeMille volunteered for the Justice Department's Intelligence Office, investigating friends, neighbors, and others he came in contact with in connection with the Famous Players-Lasky. [180] His playwright father introduced him to the theater at a young age. DeMille also was planning a film about the space race as well as another biblical epic about the Book of Revelation. More Facts. He adapted several of Belasco's screenplays into film. Occupations. [38], In 1902, he played a small part in Hamlet. It was commercially very successful. Magazine pics. imported from Wikimedia project. [67], On December 12, 1913, DeMille, his cast, and crew boarded a Southern Pacific train bound for Flagstaff via New Orleans. [90], During World War I, the Famous Players-Lasky organized a military company underneath the National Guard called the Home Guard made up of film studio employees with DeMille as captain. The first, for radio contributions, is located at 6240 Hollywood Blvd. [138] Audiences liked its highly saturated color, so DeMille made no further black-and-white features. Cecil Blount DeMille. DeMille directed The King of Kings (1927), a biography of Jesus, which gained approval for its sensitivity and reached more than 800million viewers. [32] Publicists wrote that he became an actor in order to learn how direct and produce, but DeMille admitted that he became an actor in order to pay the bills. [315] He was further nominated in the Best Picture category for The Ten Commandments at the 1957 Academy Awards. Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12, 1881 and died in 2000 De Mille Drive, Hollywood, California due to Heart failure due to a series of heart attacks on January 21, 1959. . He was entombed at the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now known as Hollywood Forever). Here, he parts the Red Sea. [337], Charles Frohman, Constance Adams, and David Belasco, Scandalous dramas, Biblical epics, and departure from Paramount, There are several variants of DeMille's surname. [261][262] He was known for his unique, working wardrobe which included riding boots, riding pants, and soft, open necked shirts. DeMille's primary criticism was of closed shops, but later included criticism of communism and unions in general. [159] The Ten Commandments, released in 1956, was DeMille's final film. Considered one of the founders of Hollywood, film producer and director Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959) earned a place in moviemaking history with such religious epic films as The Ten Commandmentsand King of Kings.. Furthermore, DeMille argued with Zukor over his extravagant and over-budget production costs. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City.[1]. DeMille instructed the guilty man to leave town and would never reveal his name. DeMille served as executive producer but could not improve Quinn's style of direction. [116], When "talking pictures" were invented in 1928, Cecil B. DeMille made a successful transition, offering his own innovations to the painful process; he devised a microphone boom and a soundproof camera blimp. [39] In the summer of 1905 DeMille joined the stock cast at the Elitch Theatre in Denver, Colorado. 22. [128] He supported Herbert Hoover and in 1928 made his largest campaign donation to Hoover. U.S. State: Massachusetts. [305] From the film industry, DeMille received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards in 1953,[306] and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America Award the same year. Cecil Blount DeMille was a founder of the Hollywood motion-picture industry, one of the most commercially successful producer-directors of his time, and one of the most influential filmmakers in history. However, Birchard acknowledged that Sarris's point was more likely that DeMille's style was behind the development of film as an art form. Cecil Blount DeMille. [191] Plot and dialogue were not a strong point of DeMille's films. In the early 1950s, DeMille was recruited by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner to serve on the board of the anti-communist National Committee for a Free Europe, the public face of the organization that oversaw the Radio Free Europe service. [153] Besides filmmaking and finishing his autobiography, DeMille was involved in other projects. Martin Scorsese recalled that DeMille had the skill to maintain control of not only the lead actors in a frame but the many extras in the frame as well. The other three children were surprised by this, as DeMille did not treat the children differently in life. [10] He worked as a playwright, administrator, and faculty member during the early years of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, established in New York City in 1884. DeMille frequently made cameos as himself in other Paramount films. Sitting in an IMAX 1 reference. Additionally, he often starred in prologues and special trailers that he created for his films, having an opportunity to personally address the audience. Broadway Actor. [253] However, Simon Louvish wrote "he was the complete master and auteur of his films"[254] and Anton Kozlovic called him the "unsung American auteur". [162] Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, it grossed over $80million, which surpassed the gross of The Greatest Show on Earth and every other film in history, except for Gone with the Wind. [240] Moreover, before his religious-themed films, many of his silent era films revolved around "husband-and-wife-divorce-and-remarry satires", considerably more adult-themed. Date of death: 21 Jan 1959. "[257] The critic Camille Paglia has called The Ten Commandments one of the ten greatest films of all time. [231] DeMille's distinctive style can be seen through camera and lighting effects as early as The Squaw Man with the use of daydream images; moonlight and sunset on a mountain; and side-lighting through a tent flap. Along the same lines, critics of DeMille often qualify him by his later spectacles and fail to consider several decades of ingenuity and energy that defined him during his generation. Its interracial love story made it commercially successful and it first publicized Hollywood as the home of the U.S. film industry. The continued success of his productions led to the founding of Paramount Pictures with Lasky and Adolph Zukor. However, his final films maintained that DeMille was still respected by his audiences. Among his best-known films are The Ten Commandments (1956), Cleopatra (1934), and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. [193], DeMille rarely gave direction to actors; he preferred to "office-direct" where he would work with actors in his office, going over characters and reading through scripts. The Warrens of Virginia (1915) $500 /week. [22] Agnes would die on February 11, 1894, at the age of three from spinal meningitis. DeMille studied famous paintings that captured the life of Christ and brought them to the screen. . To diseased proportions. View the latest Cecil B. DeMille photos. DeMille liked to sail and dive; he had several boats throughout his lifetime. [13] She had emigrated from England with her parents in 1871 when she was 18; the newly arrived family settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they maintained a middle-class, English-speaking household. His family's, DeMille's niece and William deMille's daughter. [264], DeMille was liked by some of his fellow directors and disliked by others, though his actual films were usually dismissed by his peers as vapid spectacle. [231], According to Scott Eyman, DeMille's films were at the same time masculine and feminine due to his thematic adventurousness and his eye for the extravagant. [269] He often appeared in his coming-attraction trailers and narrated many of his later films,[270] even stepping on screen to introduce The Ten Commandments.
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