Joseph Leo Mankiewicz

 Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (February 11, 1909 – February 5, 1993)

Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won the Oscar back-to-back for both Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). He worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and as a producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before getting a chance to direct at Twentieth Century-Fox. He produced A Christmas Carol (1938); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) with Mickey Rooney; and Strange Cargo (1940) with Gable and Crawford, directed by Borzage. He had a huge hit with The Philadelphia Story (1940) starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Over six years he made 11 films for Fox, reaching a peak in 1950 and 1951 when he won consecutive Academy Awards for Screenplay and Direction for both A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve, which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six. During his long career in Hollywood, Mankiewicz wrote forty-eight screenplays. However, he is best known for the films he directed, twice winning the Academy Award for Best Director. Mankiewicz also set up his own production company, Figaro. Its first production was The Barefoot Contessa (1954) which Mankiewicz wrote, produced and directed; it starred Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Sam Goldwyn hired him to write and direct the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955). His company also produced I Want to Live! (1958) though Mankiewicz had relatively little to do with it.

He directed Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) for producer Sam Spiegel, from a script by Gore Vidal and a play by Tennessee Williams. Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift starred. It was a big hit. Mankiewicz later directed Cleopatra (1963), with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, for Fox. In addition, he produced and directed Carol for Another Christmas (1964) for television .Mankiewicz garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth, his final directing effort, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Mankiewicz died of a heart attack on February 5, 1993, six days before his 84th birthday. He is interred at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard cemetery in Bedford, New York.