Joseph Walton Losey III (; January 14, 1909 – June 22, 1984) was an American film and theatre director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.
Among the most critically and commercially successful were his three films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971). His 1976 film Monsieur Klein won the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. Other notable films included The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Eva (1962), King & Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966), Figures in a Landscape (1970), A Doll's House (1973), Galileo (1975), and Don Giovanni (1979). Though drubbed by critics and a box-office failure, Boom! (1968) was sometimes cited by Losey as his personal favorite, and Tennessee Williams considered it the best movie adaptation of one of his plays. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both of whom worked with Losey again: Taylor in Secret Ceremony (1968) and Burton in The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).
Losey was also a four-time nominee for both the Palme d'Or (which he won once) and the Golden Lion, and a two-time BAFTA Award nominee.
Joseph Walton Losey III was born on January 14, 1909, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he and Nicholas Ray were high-school classmates at La Crosse Central High School. He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama.
Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933. He declined to direct a staged version of Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, which led Lewis to offer him his first work written for the stage, Jayhawker. Losey directed the show, which had a brief run. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that "The play, being increasingly wordy, presents staging problems that Joe Losey's direction does not always solve. It is hard to tell who is responsible for the obscure parts in the story."
He visited the Soviet Union for several months in 1935, to study the Russian stage. In Moscow he participated in a seminar on film taught by Sergei Eisenstein. He also met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time.
In 1936, he directed Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, a production of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. He then directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted.
Losey served in the U.S. military during World War II and was discharged in 1945. From 1946 to 1947, Losey worked with Bertolt Brecht—who was living in exile in Los Angeles—and Charles Laughton on the preparations for the staging of Brecht's play Galileo (Life of Galileo) which he and Brecht eventually co-directed with Laughton in the title role, and with music by Eisler. The play premiered on July 30, 1947, at the Coronet Theatre in Beverly Hills. On October 30, 1947, Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington D.C. for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Brecht left the US the following day. Losey went on to stage Galileo, again with Laughton in the title role, in New York City where it opened on December 7, 1947, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre. More than 25 years later Losey, in exile in England, directed a film version of Brecht's play Galileo (1975).
Losey's first feature film was a political allegory titled The Boy with Green Hair (1947), starring Dean Stockwell as Peter, a war orphan who is subject to ridicule after he awakens one morning to find his hair mysteriously turned green.
Seymour Nebenzal, the producer of Fritz Lang's classic M (1931), hired Losey to direct a remake set in Los Angeles rather than Berlin. In the new version, released in 1951, the killer's name was changed from Hans Beckert to Martin W. Harrow. Nebenzal's son Harold was associate producer of this version.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Losey maintained extensive contacts with people on the political left, including radicals and communists or those who would eventually become such. He had collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and had a long association with Hanns Eisler, both targets of HUAC's interest. Losey had written to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of a resident visa for Eisler, who had many radical associations. They had collaborated on a "political cabaret" from 1937 to 1939, and Losey had invited Eisler to compose music for a short public-relations film that he had been commissioned to produce for presentation at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Pete Roleum and His Cousins.
Losey had also worked on the Federal Theatre Project, long a target of HUAC. Losey directed the play Triple-A Plowed Under, which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as communist propaganda. His Hollywood collaborators included a long list of other HUAC targets, including Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.
Losey's first wife Elizabeth Hawes worked with a wide range of communists and anticommunist liberals at the radical newspaper PM. After their divorce in 1944, she wrote about working as a union organizer just after World War II, where "one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters." At some point, probably early in the 1940s, the FBI maintained dossiers on both Losey and Hawes, and that of Losey charged that he was a Stalinist agent as of 1945.
In 1946, Losey joined the Communist Party USA. He later explained to a French interviewer:
I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that kind of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially.
Losey was under a long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO when Howard Hughes purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists. Losey later explained how Hughes tested employees to determine whether they had communist sympathies:
I was offered a film called I Married a Communist, which I turned down categorically. I later learned that it was a touchstone for establishing who was a "red": you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought was a Communist, and if they turned it down, they were.
Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work. In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on The Lawless for Paramount Pictures. Soon he was working on a three-picture contract with Stanley Kramer. His name was mentioned by two witnesses before HUAC in the spring of 1951. Losey's attorney suggested arranging a deal with the committee for testimony in secret. Instead, Losey abandoned his work editing The Big Night and left for Europe while his ex-wife Louise departed for Mexico a few days later. HUAC took weeks to try unsuccessfully to serve them with a subpoena compelling their testimony.