Michael Curtiz (December 24, 1886 - April 10, 1962) was an Academy Award-winning Hungarian-American film director. He directed at least 50 films in Europe and a further hundred in the United States, among the best-known being The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels with Dirty Faces, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Christmas. He thrived in the heyday of the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s and '40s.
He was less successful from the late 1940s onwards, when he attempted to move from studio direction into production and freelance work, but he continued working until shortly before his death.
Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and became thoroughly entrenched in the studio system. His films during the 1930s and '40s encompassed nearly every genre imaginable and some, including Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), are considered to be film classics. His brilliance waned in the 1950s when he made a number of mediocre films for studios other than Warner. He directed his last film in 1961, a year before his death at 74.
American director of Hungarian origin, Oscar-winner. He got his diploma at the School for Dramatic Arts in 1906. First he went to Pécs, then Szeged. He made his first film in 1912. The next year he went for stud tour to Denmark to study the newest achievements of the new art in the studios of the then flourishing Nordisk company. Here he worked as assistant and director, acting as the main character in Atlantis (1913). Having returned in 1914, he went to the Jenö Janovics film factory in Kolozsvár (Cluj). In 1915, he moved back to the capital. In 1916 he worked for the Kinoriport, then he became a director for Phönix until Fall 1918. He shot 38 production in Hungary altogether. In 1919, he filmed the popular poem of Antal Farkas (II) with the title Jön az öcsém (1919). During the Commune, he settled down in Vienna. He was one of the most productive and most educated artist in Hungary at the beginning of the era of the silent film.
