Michael Curtiz (; born Manó Kaminer; from 1905 Mihály Kertész; Hungarian: Kertész Mihály; December 25, 1886 – April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian and American film director, recognized as one of the most prolific directors in history. He directed classic films from the silent era and numerous others during
Hollywood's Golden Age, when the studio system was prevalent.
Curtiz was already a well-known director in Europe when Warner Bros. invited him to Hollywood in 1926, when he was 39 years of age. He had already directed 64 films in Europe, and soon helped Warner Bros. become the fastest-growing movie studio. He directed 102 films during his Hollywood career, mostly at Warners, where he directed ten actors to Oscar nominations. James Cagney and Joan Crawford won their only Academy Awards under Curtiz's direction. He put Doris Day and John Garfield on screen for the first time, and he made stars of Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis. He himself was nominated five times, and won twice, once for Best Short Subject for Sons of Liberty and once as Best Director for Casablanca.
Curtiz was among those who introduced to Hollywood a visual style using artistic lighting, extensive and fluid camera movement, high crane shots, and unusual camera angles. He was versatile, and could handle any film genre: melodrama, comedy, love story, film noir, musical, war story, Western, horror, or historical epic. He always paid attention to the human-interest aspect of every story, stating that the "human and fundamental problems of real people" were the basis of all good drama.
The death of 25 horses in The Charge of the Light Brigade under Curtiz's direction resulted in a near-violent confrontation between Curtiz and star Errol Flynn, which led in turn to the U.S. Congress and the ASPCA enacting legislation and policy to prevent cruelty to animals on the sets of movies.
Curtiz helped popularize the classic swashbuckler, with films such as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), both starring Flynn. He directed many other dramas which are considered classics: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). He directed leading musicals, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943), and White Christmas (1954), and he made comedies, with Life with Father (1947) and We're No Angels (1955).
Curtiz was born Manó Kaminer to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1886, where his father was a carpenter and his mother an opera singer. Several dates and years of birth had been used during his lifetime; in 2017, his biographer Alan K. Rode identified Curtiz's birth certificate, which specifies that he was born at 9 pm on December 25, 1886. In 1905, he Magyarised his name to Mihály Kertész. Curtiz had a lower middle class upbringing. He recalled during an interview that his family's home was a cramped apartment, where he had to share a small room with his two brothers and a sister. "Many times, we are hungry," he said.
After graduating from high school, he studied at Markoszy University, followed by the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, in Budapest, before beginning his career.
Curtiz became attracted to the theater when he was a child in Hungary. He built a little theatre in the cellar of his family home when he was 8 years old, where he and five of his friends re-enacted plays. They set up the stage, with scenery and props, and Curtiz directed them.
After he graduated from college at age 19, he took a job as an actor with a traveling theatre company, where he began working as one of their traveling players. From that job, he became a pantomimist with a circus for a while, but then returned to join another group of traveling players for a few more years. They played Ibsen and Shakespeare in various languages, depending on what country they were in. They performed throughout Europe, including France, Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and he eventually learned five languages. He had various responsibilities:
We had to do everything—make bill posters, print programmes, set scenery, mend wardrobe, sometimes even arrange chairs in the auditoriums. Sometimes we travelled in trains, sometimes in stage coaches, sometimes on horseback. Sometimes we played in town halls, sometimes in little restaurants with no scenery at all. Sometimes we gave shows out of doors. Those strolling actors were the kindest-hearted people I have ever known. They would do anything for each other.
He worked as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912. and was a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Kertész directed Hungary's first feature film, Today and Tomorrow (Ma és holnap, 1912), in which he also had a leading role. He followed that with another film, The Last Bohemian (Az utolsó bohém, also 1912).
Curtiz began living in various cities in Europe to work on silent films in 1913. He first went to study at Nordisk studio in Denmark, which led to work as an actor and assistant director to August Blom on Denmark's first multireel feature film, Atlantis (1913).
After World War I began in 1914, he returned to Hungary, where he served in the army for a year, before he was wounded fighting on the Russian front. Curtiz wrote of that period:
The intoxicating joy of life was interrupted, the world had gone mad ... We were taught to kill. I was drafted into the Emperor's Army ... After that, many things happened: destruction, thousands forever silenced, crippled or sent to anonymous graves. Then came the collapse [of Austria-Hungary]. Fate had spared me.
He was assigned to make fund-raising documentaries for the Red Cross in Hungary. In 1917, he was made director of production at Phoenix Films, the leading studio in Budapest, where he remained until he left Hungary. However, none of the films he directed there survive intact, and most are completely lost.
By 1918, he had become one of Hungary's most important directors, having by then directed about 45 films. After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared, he continued to work following the ideological guidelines of the new regime. Most notably he directed the short film Jön az öcsém ("My brother is coming home") which has been described as one of the earliest agitprop films. He was also appointed to the "Arts Council", set up to monitor proposed film scripts. At some point before the fall of the short-lived regime, probably in late May or early June 1919, he decided to emigrate to the West.
Curtiz briefly worked at UFA GmbH, a German film company, where he learned to direct large groups of costumed extras, along with using complicated plots, rapid pacing, and romantic themes. His career truly started due to his work for Count Alexander Kolowrat (known as Sascha), with whom he made at least 21 films for the count's film studio, Sascha Films. Curtiz later wrote that at Sascha, he "learned the basic laws of film art, which, in those days, had progressed further in Vienna than anywhere else."