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King Vidor
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King Wallis Vidor (February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982) was an acclaimed American film director whose career spanned eight decades.
He was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
A freelance
newsreel cameraman and cinema
projectionist, he made his debut as a director in 1913 with
Hurricane in Galveston. In
Hollywood from 1915, he worked on a variety of film-related jobs before directing a feature film,
The Turn of the Road, in 1919. A successful mounting of
Peg o' My Heart in 1922 got him a long term contract with Goldwyn Studios, later to become
MGM. Three years later he made
The Big Parade, among the most acclaimed war films of the silent era, and a tremendous commercial success. This success established him as one of MGM's top studio directors for the next decade. In 1928, Vidor received his first Oscar nomination, for
The Crowd, widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American silent films. In the same year, he made the classic
Show People, the last silent film of
Marion Davies, a comedy about the film industry in which Vidor had a cameo as himself.
Vidor's career extended well in to the sound era and he continued making feature films until the late 1950s. Some of his better known sound films include Stella Dallas, Our Daily Bread, The Citadel, Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, and War and Peace. He directed the Kansas sequences in The Wizard of Oz (including "Over the Rainbow" ) when director Victor Fleming had to replace George Cukor on Gone with the Wind, but never received screen credit.
In 1967, Vidor researched the unsolved 1922 murder of fellow director William Desmond Taylor for a possible screenplay. Vidor never published or wrote of this research during his lifetime, but biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick posthumously examined Vidor's research. He concluded in his 1986 book, "Cast of Killers", that Vidor had indeed solved the sensational crime, but kept his conclusions private to protect individuals still living at the time. Kirkpatrick's book remains controversial with students of the crime, but the conclusions have not been refuted.[citation needed]
Vidor entered in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest career as a film director: beginning in 1913 with Hurricane in Galveston and ending in 1980 with a short documentary on painting entitled The Metaphor. He published his autobiography, "A Tree is A Tree", in 1976. He was nominated five times for an Oscar but never won in direct competition; he received an honorary award in 1979.
Vidor was married three times:
- Florence Arto (1917-1924; one daughter
- Eleanor Boardman (1926-1931); two daughters
- Elizabeth Hill (1932-1982)
Filmography
