Women Directors
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Ida was born in London to a show business family. In 1932, her mother took Ida with her to an audition and Ida got the part her mother wanted. The picture was Her First Affaire (1932). Ida, a bleached blonde, went to Hollywood in 1934 playing small, insignificant parts. Peter Ibbetson (1935) was one of her few noteworthy movies and it was not until The Light That Failed (1939) that she got a chance to get better parts. In most of her movies, she was cast as the hard, but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks. In The Sea Wolf (1941) and High Sierra (1940), she played the part magnificently. It has been said that no one could do hard-luck dames the way Lupino could do them. She played tough, knowing characters who held their own against some of the biggest leading men of the day - Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. She made a handful of films during the forties playing different characters ranging from Pillow to Post (1945), where she played a traveling saleswoman to the tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946). But good roles for women were hard to get and there were many young actresses and established stars competing for those roles. She left Warner Brothers in 1947 and became a freelance actress. When better roles did not materialize, Ida stepped behind the camera as a director, writer and producer. Her first directing job came when director Elmer Clifton fell ill on a script that she co-wrote Not Wanted (1949). Ida had joked that as an actress, she was the poor man's Bette Davis. Now, she said that as a director, she became the poor man's Don Siegel. The films that she wrote, or directed, or appeared in during the fifties were mostly inexpensive melodramas. She later turned to television where she directed episodes in shows such as The Untouchables (1959) and The Fugitive (1963). In the seventies, she made guest appearances on various television show and appeared in small parts in a few movies.- Director
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Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was born January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900), in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including: Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart, and director Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound era.
In her 15-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent movies and 14 "talkies". Her path to the director's chair was different than that of women directors in the future (indeed, different than most male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of filmmaking by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a filmmaker, she later said.
After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the pre-med program for two years. When the US entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director William C. de Mille (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm).
Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there were women directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (though she was more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a successful transition to "talkies". It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.
The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers-that-be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films, working her way up from cutting Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A" pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a filmmaker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner Blood and Sand (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bullfighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director James Cruze was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films: Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924) and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for a cutter of either gender.
While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.
Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented filmmaker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with Fashions for Women (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, The Wild Party (1929), starring Paramount's top star, Clara Bow, helped establish Fredric March as a movie star.
Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character.
Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When the studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, Christopher Strong (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was, after all, the boss on the set: The director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star. Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.
The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first woman member. Indeed, she was the only female member of the DGA for many years.
Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, phallocentric mores of the times.
Arzner was a lesbian, who cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", lesbian critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive, and indeed thrived, in the all-male world of studio filmmaking, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.
Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 MGM vehicles, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele.
In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as John Ford and George Stevens in going to work for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for the US Army's Women's Army Corps (WACs). That same year her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a filmmaking teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus during the 1960s and 1970s. At UCLA she taught directing and screenwriting, and one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at UCLA until her death in 1979.
She was honored in her own lifetime, becoming a symbol and role model for women filmmakers who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the DGA honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?"- Actress
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Elaine May (born under the name Elaine Iva Berlin) is an American actress, comedian, film director, playwright, and screenwriter from Philadelphia. Her professional career started in the 1950s and is still ongoing. She has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She is best remembered for directing the Cold War-themed action comedy "Ishtar" (1987). She won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director, but the film has had a vocal minority of critics who defend its quality.
In 1932, May was born to a Jewish-American family. Both her parents were theatrical actors. Her father Jack Berlin was also a theater director and led his own traveling Yiddish theater company. Her mother was actress Ida Aaron. May made her stage debut c. 1935, at the age of 3. Her father had decided to include her in his performances. As a a child actress, she was reportedly cast in the roles of boys.
The theater company toured extensively, and May was part of their tours. She kept changing schools, enrolling for a few weeks and then moving to another city. May reputedly hated school, but loved reading books on her own. Her favorite topics were fairy tales and mythology.
Jack Berlin died c. 1942, and May's career as a child actress consequently ended. She was left in the custody of her mother. The duo settled in Los Angeles, and May eventually enrolled in Hollywood High School. In 1946, May dropped out of school. In 1948, she married her her first husband, the toy inventor Marvin May. She was only 16-years-old at the time of her marriage. She would later keep her husband's surname as her professional name.
In 1949, May had her only child, Jeannie Brette May. Jeannie would later become a professional actress in her own right, under the name Jeannie Berlin. May and her husband separated c. 1950, and she received a divorce in 1960. She started supporting herself through a series of odd jobs.
In 1950, May was interested in attending college, but most colleges in California required applicants to have high school diplomas. As a high school dropout, she did not have the necessary diploma. Learning that the University of Chicago did not use this requirement, she hitch-hiked her way to Chicago, At the time her personal fortune consisted of 7 dollars.
Once she arrived in Chicago, May started informally taking classes at the university by auditing, sitting in without enrolling. She habitually engaged in discussions with her instructors. She once had a fight with a philosophy instructor because of their different interpretations of the motives behind Socrates' apology. May was introduced to aspiring actor Mike Nichols (1931-2014),who was also attending the University. They bonded over their shared passion for the theater.
In 1955, May became one of the charter members of the Compass Players, a Chicago-based improvisational theater group. Nichols joined the group shortly after. The two of them formed a working partnership, jointly developing improvised comedy sketches. May helped the Compass Players to become a highly popular comedy troupe, due to her talent for satire. She helped in the training of novice members of the group.
In 1957, Nichols was asked to leave the Compass Players. His popularity had outshone most members of the group, and had caused internal conflicts. May left the group with him. They then decided to form their own stand-up comedy team, "Nichols and May". Their improvisational skills, and ability to come up with fresh material allowed them to impress their audience.
In 1960, the comedy duo made their Broadway debut, with the show "An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May". A recording of the show won the 1962 "Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album". "Nichols and May" became very popular in New York City, performing in sold-out shows. They also started making appearances in radio and television, and even recorded commercials.
May was reportedly surprised with her own success. She had spend much of her adult life in near-poverty, but she was now earning a regular income from show business. She joked in an interview that she was practically barefoot when she arrived in New York, and now had to get used to wearing high heels.
In 1961, the duo was at the height of their fame. But they decided to dissolve their partnership in order to pursue solo careers. Nichols started working as a Broadway stage director, while May started her new career as a playwright. Her most successful play was "Adaptation" (1969), which she also directed. For her work as a theatrical director, she won the 1969 "Outer Critics Circle Award, Best Director".
May made her debut as a film director with the black comedy "A New Leaf" (1971). It was an adaptation of a short story by Jack Ritchie (1922-1983), depicting the story of an impoverished patrician who marries a wealthy heiress for her money. The main character initially considers murdering his wife to inherit her wealth, but first he has to protect her from other predators who were after her money.
Her first film found little success at the box office, but was praised by critics and was nominated for the "Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy". It later earned a reputation as a cult classic, and in 2019 it was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
Her second film was the romantic comedy "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972). It concerns a newlywed man who falls madly in love with a younger woman while on his honeymoon. He pursues his romantic interest obsessively despite all signs that his love is unrequited, and despite the disapproval of the woman's protective father. The film was critically acclaimed, and has at times been listed in retrospectives concerning the funniest American films.
In an unusual career move, her third film was not a comedy. It was the rather bleak gangster film "Mikey and Nicky" (1976). It depicts a small-time mobster whose life is in danger, resorting to asking for help from his childhood friend. While creating this film, May got involved in a legal dispute with the film studio Paramount Pictures. The studio eventually decided to only allow a limited release for the film. The film found a niche audience in the home video market, but May's career as a director suffered from this dispute. She was effectively blacklisted.
May decided to focus on her screenwriting career. She found success with the script to the fantasy-comedy "Heaven Can Wait" (1978), about the afterlife of a man who died prematurely. The film was based on a 1938 play by Harry Segall (1892-1975), and also served as a remake to the classic film "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941) which was based on the same play. The film earned about 99 million dollars at the worldwide box office, and was a critical hit. May was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Oliver Stone (1946-).
During the early 1980s, May mainly worked as an uncredited script doctor. She "polished" scripts by other screenwriters. Her greatest success in this role was the romantic comedy "Tootsie" (1982), for which she wrote several additional scenes. She attempted her comeback as a director with the action comedy "Ishtar" (1987), which became a box office flop for the film studio Columbia Pictures. The film's failure reportedly convinced Columbia's parent company Coca-Cola to sell the under-performing studio to Sony.
"Ishtar" was derided at the time as the worst film of its era by many critics, but was also defended by a vocal minority of critics. It has since attracted a cult audience, who consider this to be a great film. However the film's failure ended May's career as a film director and damaged her reputation. She also ceased working as a screenwriter for several years, reduced to working as an actress again.
May made her comeback as a screenwriter with the comedy film "The Birdcage" (1996), a remake of the European comedy "La Cage aux Folles" (The Cage of Madwomen, 1978). In the film, the openly gay parents to a young man have to pretend to be straight in an attempt to impress their son's prospective in-laws. The film earned about 185 million dollars at the worldwide box office, the greatest hit in May's career up to that point. She was nominated for the "Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay", but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton (1955-).
May found more critical success with her next screenplay, for the political film "Primary Colors" (1998). It was an adaptation of the roman à clef novel "Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics" (1996) by Joe Klein (1946-). The novel itself was a fictionalized version of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, and depicts an idealistic campaign worker's disillusionment with the politician. The film's cast were nominated for several awards. May herself received her second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but the award was instead won by rival screenwriter Bill Condon (1955-).
May largely retired from screenwriting since the end of the 1990s. As an actress, she had a supporting role in the crime-comedy "Small Time Crooks" (2000). The film concerned nouveau riche criminals, who attempt to socialize with the American upper class. For this role, she won the "Best Supporting Actress Award" at the National Society of Film Critics Awards.
May lived in retirement until joining the cast of the television mini-series "Crisis in Six Scenes" (2016), her first television role in several decades. The series was created by Woody Allen (1935-), who happened to be an old friend of May.
In 2018, May made a theatrical comeback in Broadway. She played the elderly gallery owner Gladys Green in a revival of the play "The Waverly Gallery" (2000) by Kenneth Lonergan (1962-). In the play, Gladys shows early signs of Alzheimer's disease, and her family has to deal with her mental decline. May received critical acclaim for this role. For this role, she won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. At age 87, she was the second-oldest winner of a Tony Award for acting.
As of 2021, May is 89-years-old. She is no longer very active, but she reportedly has plans to direct another film. She remains a popular actress.- Actress
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Joan Darling began her career with the New York improvisational theater troupe "Premise Players", and soon graduated to off-Broadwy and Broadway productions. She made her film debut in 1964 and, in the early '70s, landed a regular role on the Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law (1971) TV series. In addition to acting in TV series, she began to write for them. Her first directorial job was for the pilot of the hit '70s TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976) and she directed several of the series' episodes. She became one of the first female TV directors to be steadily employed on various series, and directed many episodes of M*A*S*H (1972), the The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) show and The Bob Newhart Show (1972). She made her film debut in 1977 with the critically acclaimed but financially unsuccessful First Love (1977), and has made several theatrical and made-for-TV movies since then.- Actress
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Penny Marshall was born Carole Penny Marshall on October 15, 1943 in Manhattan. The Libra was 5' 6 1/2", with brown hair and green eyes. She was the daughter of Marjorie (Ward), a tap dance teacher, and Anthony "Tony" Marshall, an industrial film director. She was the younger sister of filmmakers Garry Marshall and Ronny Hallin. Her father was of Italian descent, originally surnamed "Masciarelli," and her mother was of German, Scottish, English, and Irish ancestry.
Penny was known in her family as "the bad one"... because not only did she walk on the ledge of her family's apartment building, but she snuck into the movies as a child and even dated a guy named "Lefty." She attended a private girls' high school in New York and then went to the University of New Mexico for two and a half years. There, Penny got pregnant with daughter, Tracy Reiner, and soon after married the father, Michael Henry, in 1961. The couple divorced two years later in 1963. She worked as a secretary for awhile. Her film debut came from her brother Garry Marshall, who put her in the movie How Sweet It Is! (1968) with the talented Debbie Reynolds and James Garner. She also did a dandruff commercial with Farrah Fawcett - the casting people, of course, giving Farrah the part of the "beautiful girl" and Penny the part of the "plain girl." This only added to Penny's insecurity with her looks.
She then married Rob Reiner on April 10, 1971, shortly after getting her big television break as Oscar Madison's secretary, Myrna Turner, on The Odd Couple (1970). She also played Mary Richards' neighbor, Paula Kovacks, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) for a couple of episodes. However, her Laverne & Shirley (1976) fame came when her brother needed two women to play "fast girls" who were friends of Arthur Fonzarelli and would date Fonzie and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days (1974). Penny had been working on miscellaneous writing projects ("My Country Tis Of Thee", a bicentennial spoof for Francis Ford Coppola and "Paper Hands" about the Salem Witch Trials) with writing partner Cindy Williams. Cindy happened to be a friend and ex-girlfriend of Henry Winkler's, so Garry asked the two to play the parts of these girls. The audience saw their wonderful chemistry, and loved them so much, a spin-off was created for them.
Penny was well-known as Laverne DeFazio. She and Rob had divorced in 1980. The show ended three years later, half a year after Cindy Williams left the show due to pregnancy (her first baby, Emily, from now ex-husband Bill Hudson)... they wanted Williams to work the week she was supposed to deliver.
Soon after, Penny began directing such films as Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), Big (1988) and A League of Their Own (1992). Her hobbies included needlepoint, jigsaw puzzles and antique shopping. She was best friends with actress Carrie Fisher and was godmother to Carrie's daughter, Billie.
Penny died at 75 in Los Angeles, California.- Director
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A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be critiqued by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. Later she earned a scholarship to study film at Columbia University School of Arts, graduating in 1979. She was also a member of the British avant garde cultural group, Art and Language. Kathryn is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian.- Director
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Nicole Holofcener was born on 22 March 1960 in New York City, New York, USA. She is a director and writer, known for Enough Said (2013), Friends with Money (2006) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). She was previously married to Benjamin Allanoff.- Director
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Born in 1966 in Salta in the North of Argentina,Lucrecia Martel settled down in Buenos Aires where she attended the ENERC (National Film School). She started by directing a few shorts among which Historias Breves I: Rey muerto (1995), which garnered several awards in the international film festival circuit. From 1995 to 1998, she made a series of documentaries for TV as well as a children's TV programme, hailed by the Argentinian press for its unusual dark humor. From 2001 until today, Lucrecia Martel has managed to make three very personal feature films, The Swamp (2001), The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), in which she explores her favorite theme, troubled minds.- Actress
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A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift's secretary in Wild River (1960). He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty's wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan's protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan's stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater's production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic's Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well - But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling . After appearing in the failed movie Fade In (1973) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement. Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival's International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success. She expressed interest and was in the midst of putting together another film, based on the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, when she learned in 1978 she had breast cancer. Barbara died two and a half years later, at age 48, after the cancer spread to her liver - before the project ever came to fruition. The Hollywood industry lost a burgeoning talent who just might have opened doors for other women directors had she been given the time.- Director
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Leontine Sagan was born on 13 February 1889 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]. She was a director and actress, known for Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Men of Tomorrow (1932) and Showtime (1946). She was married to Dr. Victor Fleischer (dramatist). She died on 20 May 1974 in Pretoria, South Africa.- Director
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Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and I, You, He, She (1974). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, France.- Writer
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During the 1970s, Lina Wertmüller emblazoned her name into the pantheon of Italian cinema with a series of intensely polemical, deeply controversial and wonderfully entertaining films. Among the most politically outspoken and iconoclastic members of the second generation of postwar directors - the direct heirs to the neo-realists - Wertmüller was also one of the first woman directors to be internationally recognized and acclaimed. Armed with a keenly satiric and Rabelaisian humor, Wertmüller reinvented the narrative forms and character types of Italian comedy to create one of the rare examples of a radical, politically galvanized cinema that managed to achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, the fierce invectives against social, cultural and historical inequities at the heart of Wertmüller's mid-1970s masterworks Love and Anarchy, Seven Beauties and Swept Away seemed only to help the films find an appreciative audience, especially in the United States, where they broke box office records for foreign films and even secured Wertmüller an Oscar nomination for Best Director - the very first woman named for this category. Although Wertmüller remains a well-known name, her remarkable films are strangely overlooked and only selectively revisited. And yet, the incredible energy and daring of her most popular works is equally present in lesser-known masterpieces such as All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi, films that are both extremely topical and yet still totally relevant today.- Director
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Childhood in Mozambique. Adolescency in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, Brazil, where she studies music: piano. Course of Biology (diplom) in Coimbra, Portugal. During the same time, she makes a Theater Course, - takes part for 6 years of the Theater Group CITAC - has a radio programm about Art and works in an Art Gallery where she makes experimental videos and installations. Since 1994 student at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, Berlin (dffb).- Director
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At the time when women directors make more and more their presence felt on the French scene, the importance of Jacqueline Audry cannot be overstated. All today's daring Metteuses En Scene are certainly her psychic daughters as they are Agnès Varda's. Audry, born in 1908, began to direct long before Varda, as contemporary of Ida Lupino in America. Audry's movies mostly dealt with female psychology from every angle. Her first effort was a subversive adaptation of La Comtesse De Ségur's "Les Malheurs De Sophie" (1946), the young heroine refused the aristocratic happiness and eventually took a rebel stand. "Gigi" (1948) (remade by Vincente Minnelli as a musical) and "Minne" (1950), both from Colette's novels, featured Danielle Delorme. But it was the overlooked "Olivia" (1951) which revealed Audry's remarkable talent: in a boarding-school for girls, two female teachers vied with each other for their students love; using literary works to enhance her story, helped by Edwige Feuillère's masterful performance, this Audry's tour De force about lesbianism was far ahead of its time. "Huis clos" (1954) from Sartre was her second great achievement: the beginning (the elevator) might have inspired Alan Parker for "Angel Heart", using flashbacks to avoid filmed stage production style, Audry's directing is dazzling, with an excellent cast featuring glorious Arletty as lesbian Inès. 'La Garçonne", a remake of a thirties movie which surpassed its model, introduced a woman who would want to live like a man, it contained scenes which, at the time, were more scandalous than what Roger Vadim was doing with Brigitte Bardot. Sadly, another remake, "L'Ecole Des Cocottes" (1958) ,could not hold a candle to the thirties version featuring Raimu. Her last worthwhile effort was "Le Secret Du Chevalier D'Eon" (1960), the fictionalized story of Louis The Fifteenth's spy who used to dress up as a woman: this film and "La Garçonne" featured Andrée Debar, whose androgynous looks worked wonders. A road movie ("Les Petits Matins",1961) and other indifferent movies in the sixties and Audry's career closed in 1971. She died in 1977, and she had unfairly sunk into oblivion. She was married to screenwriter Pierre Laroche who would work with her.- Director
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Sofia Coppola was born on May 14, 1971 in New York City, New York, USA as Sofia Carmina Coppola. She is a director, known for Somewhere (2010), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). She has been married to Thomas Mars since August 27, 2011. They have two daughters, Romy and Cosima. She was previously married to Spike Jonze.- Writer
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- Director
Nancy Jane Meyers is an American filmmaker. She has written, produced, and directed many critically and commercially successful films including Private Benjamin (1980), Irreconcilable Differences (1984), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride Part II (1995), The Parent Trap (1998), What Women Want (2000), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), It's Complicated (2009), and The Intern (2015).