Richard Fleischer

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 345-351. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Joined RKO in 1940, and for the next three years, co-wrote and edited the Pathe newsreel series "This Is America". He followed this with "Flicker Flashbacks", a series of silent film compilations, which he also produced.

He directed feature films from 1946, under contract first with RKO (to 1951), followed by spells at 20th Century Fox (1955-61 and 1966-69) and Columbia (1971-72), free-lancing in between. He was best known for economically made suspense thrillers and tough crime dramas. His own personal favorite was The Narrow Margin (1952), shot on a budget of $230,000 within just 13 days. Other hits were dramatisations of real-life murder cases: Compulsion (1959), The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971). He did considerably less well in other genres, particularly after the mid-1960's, when the law of diminishing return applied to an ever increasing number of duds, including Doctor Dolittle (1967), Che! (1969), The Jazz Singer (1980) and Red Sonja (1985).

He won an Academy Award for one of his earliest films - a documentary Design for Death (1947).

His father's animation studios was one of the biggest competitors to Walt Disney's studio. Ironically, Disney ended up hiring Richard to direct this feature, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

Richard firmly established his credentials with such epics as The Vikings (1958) , 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Barabbas (1961) and also proved to be a master of intimate drama with Compulsion (1959) , which won Cannes Festival awards for it's male stars.

The filming of Soylent Green (1973), which he directed, was suspended for a week because of the death of his father Max Fleischer.

Grandsons, Nick (b. 1985) and Skyler (b. 1987). Granddaughters, Vivian (b. 1993), Claire (b. 1990) and Helen (b. 1996).