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Josef von Sternberg (29 May 1894 – 22 December 1969) — born Jonas Sternberg — was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his distinctive mise en scène, use of lighting and soft lens, and seven-film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich.
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Von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to a Jewish family in Vienna. When he was two years old the family moved to America, and he spent most of his childhood in New York City and Lynbrook, New York. His father, Moses (Morris) Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary, twice tried to make a home for the family in the US before finding employment as a lace worker. (The false aristocratic title 'von' was added in 1925 by actor/co-producer Elliott Dexter during the production of By Divine Right, supposedly to "even up" the credits as they appeared on screen. Sternberg did not protest, since it invited comparison with his hero, Erich von Stroheim.).
Von Sternberg dropped out of Jamaica High School and worked as an errand boy in a lace warehouse. He later obtained a job cleaning and repairing movie prints, and soon found himself working for William A. Brady at the World Film Studio at Fort Lee, New Jersey. He made his directorial debut in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, called by some the first American independent film.
Charlie Chaplin was impressed by The Salvation Hunters, and encouraged Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to acquire the rights to it. Pickford also asked Sternberg to direct a film with her as star, but rejected his first scenario. Chaplin also commissioned him to write and direct A Woman of the Sea (also known as The Sea Gull), starring his former star and lover Edna Purviance, but this film was later destroyed by Chaplin. Still photographs from A Woman of the Sea were published by Purviance's family in 2008.
Von Sternberg had commercial success later in the decade at Paramount Pictures with the late-period silent films The Last Command and The Docks of New York (1928), both noted for their influential cinematography. His reputation was also advanced by a series of early gangster films including Underworld and Thunderbolt.
Von Sternberg's career suffered a decline after Thunderbolt and he accepted an invitation to make a film in Germany. In 1929, Sternberg worked in Berlin and directed the widely acclaimed film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930) in both German and English versions simultaneously, the first German-language talkie. It was Sternberg's second film with the German actor Emil Jannings as the doomed Professor Rath. (The first was The Last Command.)
Von Sternberg also cast the not well known Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola, the female lead, and overnight made her an international star. Sternberg and Dietrich continued to collaborate on Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935). The Scarlet Empress is particularly celebrated for its atmospheric and suggestively demonic production design.
In 1932, von Sternberg commissioned architect Richard Neutra to design the 'Von Sternberg House', an avant-garde American modernism architectural style residence inside a walled estate compound on acreage in the walnut groves. (The author Ayn Rand later acquired the property, with the modernism evocative of 'The Fountainhead,' and resided there. This landmark was demolished in 1972 for construction of the Teledyne complex.)
Von Sternberg is one of the directors to whom has been attributed the origin of the expression "MOS", a phrase used when a scene is to be filmed without sound .
Macao (1952) was von Sternberg's last Hollywood film. Anatahan (1953), made in Japan, is the story of a group of Japanese soldiers who refused to believe that the Second World War had ended. The film, which was directed, photographed, narrated, and written by von Sternberg, saw limited release and was a financial failure. It was also Sternberg's final film; although another Hollywood picture he co-directed (Jet Pilot) was released in 1957, it had actually been shot seven years earlier, when he was still under contract to producer Howard Hughes.
Between 1959 and 1963 von Sternberg taught a course on film aesthetics at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on his own films. His students included Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, who went on to form the rock group The Doors. References to Sternberg films appear in some songs by the group, and Manzarek describes Sternberg as "perhaps the greatest single influence on The Doors."
In 1965, von Sternberg wrote an autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, which took its title from an early film comedy; also, over fifty production stills (from the Purviance family's collection), showing his work on A Woman of the Sea, were published in 2008.
Von Sternberg died from a heart attack in 1969 at age 75. He was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California near several film studios.
Josef von Sternberg
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