Stanley Donen

Stanley Donen was born on April 13, 1924, in Columbia, South Carolina to Mordecai Moses Donen, a dress-shop manager, and Helen (Cohen), the daughter of a jewelry salesman. Born to Jewish parents, Donen became an atheist in his youth. He shot and screened home movies with an 8 mm camera and projector that his father bought for him. In 1946, Donen briefly returned to Broadway to help choreograph dance numbers for Call Me Mister. ==Film career==

1943–1949: Hollywood choreographer In 1943 Arthur Freed, the producer of musical films at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, bought the film rights to Best Foot Forward and made a film version starring Lucille Ball and William Gaxton. Donen moved to Hollywood to audition for the film and signed a one-year contract with MGM. Donen accepted and choreographed three dance sequences with Kelly in Cover Girl (1944). but returned to MGM the following year when Kelly wanted assistance on his next film. Donen stated that Kelly was "responsible for most of the dance movements. I was behind the camera in the dramatic and musical sequences." 1949–1952: MGM contract director After the success of On the Town, Donen signed a seven-year contract with MGM as a director. His next two films were for Freed, but were made without Kelly's participation. starred Astaire and Jane Powell as a brother-sister American dancing team performing in England during the royal wedding of Elizabeth and Philip in 1947. Judy Garland was originally cast in the lead role, but was fired for absenteeism due to illness and was ultimately replaced by Powell. and was released in March 1951. Next, Donen made Love Is Better Than Ever, which was not released until March 1952. The film stars Larry Parks as a streetwise show business agent who is compelled to marry an innocent young dance teacher (Elizabeth Taylor). Donen and Kelly appear in cameo roles. The reason for the film's delayed release (by over a year) was Parks's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his eventual admission of his former membership in the Communist Party, and for naming other participants. The film was a hit when it was released in April 1952, earning over $7.6 million. This time, MGM refused to allow the co-directors to shoot on location in New York. 1956–1959: director and independent producer Donen's next film was at Paramount Pictures for producer Roger Edens. Funny Face (1957) contains four of the original George and Ira Gershwin songs from the otherwise unrelated 1927 Broadway musical of the same name that had starred Fred Astaire. Loosely based on the life of fashion photographer Richard Avedon, who was also the visual consultant and designed the opening title sequence for the film, it was written by Leonard Gershe and included additional music by Gershe and Edens. stars Doris Day and John Raitt, with music by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and choreography by Bob Fosse. Raitt plays a plant supervisor at a nightwear factory who is in constant disputes with the plant's union organizer (Day), until they end up falling in love. 1960–1969: United Kingdom After Indiscreet Donen made England his home until the early 1970s. Charade was produced by Stanley Donen Productions, Donen made another Hitchcock-inspired film with Arabesque (1966), starring Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren. The film was written by Julian Mitchell and Stanley Price, with an uncredited rewrite by Peter Stone. On the other hand, Time magazine called it the feeblest of all known variations on the Faust theme. Staircase (1969) is Donen's adaptation of the autobiographical stage play by Charles Dyer with music by Dudley Moore. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton star as a middle-aged gay couple who run a London barber shop and live together in a "bad marriage". 1970–2003: Later works After Donen's marriage to Adelle Beatty ended, he moved back to Hollywood in 1970. It was released in 1974 and was a financial disaster. Donen made the science fiction film Saturn 3 (1980), starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Donen first read the script when its writer (and Movie Movies set designer) John Barry showed it to him, prompting Donen to pass it along to Lew Grade. Donen was initially hired to produce, but Grade asked him to complete the film when first-time director Barry was unable to direct. Donen's last theatrical film was Blame It on Rio (1984). The film is a remake of the Claude Berri film '''' (1977) In 2002 Donen directed Elaine May's musical play Adult Entertainment starring Danny Aiello and Jeannie Berlin in Stamford, Connecticut. In 2004 he was awarded the Career Golden Lion at the 61st Venice International Film Festival. == Technical innovation ==

Style Donen is credited with having made the transition of Hollywood musical films from realistic backstage dramas to a more integrated art form in which the songs were a natural continuation of the story. Before Donen and Kelly made their films, musicals – such as the extravagant and stylized work of Busby Berkeley – were often set in a Broadway stage environment where the musical numbers were part of a stage show. Donen and Kelly's films created a more cinematic form and included dances that could only be achieved in the film medium. Donen stated that what he was doing was a "direct continuation from the Astaire – Rogers musicals ... which in turn came from René Clair and from Lubitsch ... What we did was not geared towards realism but towards the unreal." Donen is highly respected by film historians, but his career is often compared to Kelly's, and there is debate over who deserves more credit for their collaborations. Their relationship was complicated, both professionally and personally, but Donen's films as a solo director are generally better regarded by critics than Kelly's. French film critic Jean-Pierre Coursodon has said that Donen's contribution to the evolution of the Hollywood musical "outshines anybody else's, including Vincente Minnelli's". Cine-dance Donen made a host of critically acclaimed and popular films. His most important contribution to the art of film was helping to transition movie musicals from the realistic backstage settings of filmed theater to a more cinematic form that integrates film with dance. Eventually film scholars named this concept "cine-dance" (a dance that can only be created in the medium of film), and its origins are in the Donen/Kelly films. When "talkies" began to gain momentum in the film industry, the Hollywood studios recruited the best talent from Broadway to make musical films, such as Broadway Melody and Berkeley's 42nd Street. These films established the backstage musical, a subgenre in which the plot revolves around a stage show and the people involved in putting it on. They set the standard for the musical genre, placing their musical numbers either within the context of a stage performance or tacked on and gratuitous, without furthering the story or developing the characters. By the time they made Take Me Out to the Ball Game they had perfected what Martin Rubin called an "indication of changing trends in musical films" which differed from the Berkeley spectacles towards "relatively small-scale affairs that place the major emphasis on comedy, transitions to the narrative, the cleverness of the lyrics and the personalities and performance skills of the stars, rather than on spectacle and group dynamics." Rubin credits Donen and Kelly with making musicals more realistic, compared to Berkeley's style of a "separation of narrative space from performance space" Take Me Out to the Ball Game was Berkeley's last film as a director and today can be viewed as a passing of the torch. Both Donen and Kelly found working with Berkeley difficult, and the director left before the film's completion. When Donen and Kelly released On the Town, they boldly opened the film with an extravagant musical number shot on location in New York with fast-paced editing and experimental camera work, thus breaking from the conventions of that time. Their most celebrated film ''Singin' in the Rain'' is appropriately a musical about the birth of the movie musical. The film includes a musical montage which Donen said was "doing Busby Berkeley here, only we're making fun of him." Charness stated that ''Singin' in the Rain'''s references to Berkeley "marks the first time the Hollywood musical had ever been reflexive, and amused at its own extravagant non-dancing inadequacy, at that" and that Berekeley's "overhead kaleidoscope floral pattern is predominantly featured, as is the line of tap-dancing chorines, who are seen only from the knees down." Charness also stated that the film's cinematography "moves the audience perspective along with the dance." Charness singled out the film's famous title number and states, "it's a very kinetic moment, for though there is no technically accomplished dance present, the feeling of swinging around in a circle with an open umbrella is a brilliantly apt choice of movement, one that will be readily identifiable by an audience which might know nothing kinesthetically of actual dance ... Accompanying this movement is a breathless pullback into a high crane shot that takes place at the same time Kelly is swinging into his widest arcs with the umbrella. The effect is dizzying. Perhaps the finest single example of the application of camera know-how to a dance moment in Donen-Kelly canon." He also complimented Donen's direction in the "Moses Supposes" number, including "certain camera techniques which Donen had by now formularized ... the dolly shot into medium shot to signify the ending of one shot and the beginning of another." Although Donen credits earlier musicals by René Clair, Lubitsch and Astaire as "integrated", he also states that "in the early musicals of Lubitsch and Clair, they made it clear from the beginning that their characters were going to sing operatically. Gene and I didn't go that far. In 'Moses Supposes', he and Donald sort of talk themselves into a song." Donen's Royal Wedding and Give A Girl A Break continued to use special effect shots to create elaborate dance sequences. ==Relationship with Gene Kelly==

Donen's relationship with Gene Kelly was complicated and he often spoke bitterly about his former friend and mentor decades after they worked together. Kelly was never explicitly negative about Donen in later years. Jeanne Coyne with Kelly (far right) in 1958. Coyne married Donen in 1948 and later married Kelly in 1960. At age 7 Coyne enrolled in the Gene Kelly Studio of Dance in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and developed a schoolgirl crush on him In her twenties she was cast in Best Foot Forward, where she reconnected with Kelly and first met Donen, and that Donen was very close to both her and Kelly. Professional conflict Donen and Kelly's relationship has been described as similar to that of the characters Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown in ''Singin' in the Rain, with Kelly as the star performer and Donen as his trusted sidekick. he said that MGM producer Roger Edens was his biggest promoter. At a 1991 tribute to Comden and Green, Kelly said in a public speech that Donen "needed [him] to grow up with" but added "I needed Stanley at the back of the camera." During the shooting of On the Town'', all memos and correspondence from MGM to the production were addressed exclusively to Donen and not to Kelly. However, actress Kathleen Freeman stated that when people visited the set of ''Singin' in the Rain to relate their experiences during the silent era, they would ask to speak with Kelly. Singin' in the Rain'' art director Randall Duell stated "Gene ran the show. Stan had some good ideas and worked with Gene, but he was still the 'office boy' to Gene, in a sense, although Gene had great respect for him." Kelly became more involved with the ''Singin' in the Rain'' script during its third draft, which was when its structure began to resemble the final version. Comparing Donen and Kelly's films as solo directors, Donen's were usually more critically acclaimed and financially successful than Kelly's films. Kelly's film Hello, Dolly! (1969) is credited with effectively killing the Hollywood musical. ==Personal life==

at a 2010 Lincoln Center retrospective Donen married and divorced five times and had three children. His first wife was dancer, choreographer and actress Jeanne Coyne. They married on April 14, 1948, and divorced in May 1951. Donen's third wife was Adelle, Countess Beatty. She had previously been the second wife of the 2nd Earl Beatty. They married in 1960, had one son (Mark Donen, born 1962), and lived together in London. Donen's second son, Joshua Donen, is a film producer who worked on such films as The Quick and the Dead and Gone Girl. Mark Donen, Stanley's third son, worked as a production assistant on Blame It on Rio. In 1959, Donen's father Mordecai died at 59 in Beaufort, South Carolina. In his final years he occasionally appeared at film festivals and retrospectives and continued to develop ideas for film projects. He was the subject of the 2010 documentary Stanley Donen: You Just Do It. In December 2013 it was announced that Donen was in pre-production for a new film co-written with Elaine May, to be produced by Mike Nichols. A table reading of the script for potential investors included such actors as Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin and Jeannie Berlin. In celebration of Donen's 90th birthday in 2014, a retrospective of his work, "A Lotta Talent and a Little Luck: A Celebration of Stanley Donen", was held from July to August in Columbia, South Carolina. It included a tour of Donen's childhood neighborhood, a lecture by Steven Silverman and film screenings at the Columbia Film Society Donen frequented as a child. On February 21, 2019, Donen died at age 94 from heart failure in New York City, two months short of his 95th birthday. In addition to May, he is survived by two sons and a sister. ==Filmography==

On the Town (1949 poster) crop.jpg|On the Town (1949) Singin' in the Rain (1952 poster).jpg|''Singin' in the Rain'' (1952) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954 poster).jpg|Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) Funny Face (1957 poster).jpg|Funny Face (1957) Charade (1963 poster).jpg|Charade (1963) Selected filmography ==Honors and legacy ==

During his career Donen's biggest rival was Vincente Minnelli, to whom he is often compared. Like Donen, Minnelli was a contract director at MGM known for the musicals he made for the Freed Unit. According to Donen's biographer Stephen M. Silverman, critics tend to "express a distinct preference for Donen's bold, no-nonsense style of direction over Minnelli's Impressionist visual palette and Expressionist character motivations", while most film directors are said to prefer Minnelli's work. Andrew Sarris dismisses Donen as being without a personal style of his own and as being dependent upon his collaborators on his better films. Pedro Almodóvar, Lindsay Anderson, Jules Dassin, William Friedkin, Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg, François Truffaut, Donen's skill as a director has been praised by such actors as Cyd Charisse, and Baz Luhrmann The 2011 film The Artist pays tribute to ''Singin' in the Rain'' (among other films), and Donen praised the film after attending its Los Angeles premiere. ''Singin' in the Rain'' is Donen's most revered film and it was included in the first group of films to be inducted into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1989 and has been included on Sight & Sounds prestigious list of "Top Ten Films" twice, in 1982 and in 2002. Chaplin and Truffaut were among its earliest admirers. Billy Wilder called the film "one of the five greatest pictures ever made." ==See also==