Josef von Sternberg

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1041-1051. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me. " Forced by poverty to drop out of high school, von Sternberg worked for a time in a Manhattan store that sold ribbons and lace to hat makers. A chance meeting in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, led to a new career in the cleaning and repair of movie prints. This job provided an entrée to the film production industry, then flourishing in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As an apprentice film-maker, from around 1916 to the early 1920s, von Sternberg developed a lasting contempt for most of the directors and producers he worked for (an exception was Emile Chautard, who acted in some of Sternberg's films of the 1930s), and was sure that he could improve on their products.

In the USA he got in touch with the film business in 1919 and he made first experiences as a director assistant in movies like "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" (1919).

In 1924 he also wrote his first screenplay for "By Divine Right" (1924) where he was also engaged as a director assistant. His last movie as an assistant was for the box office hit "It" (1927).

Staked to a few thousand dollars -- even then an absurdly small budget -- von Sternberg proved himself right with The Salvation Hunters (1925), which became a critical and financial hit. For the next couple of years he seesawed between acclaim and oblivion, sometimes on the same project (for instance, he received the rare honor of directing a film for Charles Chaplin, but it was shelved after only one showing and later disappeared forever).

His commercial breakthrough was Underworld (1927), a prototypical Hollywood gangster film; behind the scenes, von Sternberg successfully battled Ben Hecht, the writer, for creative control.

With The Last Command (1928), starring the equally strong-willed Emil Jannings, von Sternberg began a period of almost a decade as one of the most celebrated artists of world cinema.

Both his film career and his personal life were transformed in the making of Der blaue Engel (1930). Chosen by Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to make Germany's first major sound picture, von Sternberg gambled by casting Marlene Dietrich, then obscure, as Lola Lola, the night-club dancer who leads Jannings' character into depravity. The von Sternberg-Dietrich story, both on-screen (he directed her in six more movies) and off (he became one of her legions of lovers, more in love with her than most) is a staple of film histories. His films of the mid-'30s are among the most visionary ever made in Hollywood, but in spite of their visual sumptuousness, contemporary audiences found them dramatically inert.

Was voted the 37th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

He maintained such a tyrannical, imperious personality when shooting films that Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier when they were shooting Macao (1952).

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Is portrayed by Hans Werner Meyer in Marlene (2000)