Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was born in Pennsylvania in 1909 from two Jews immigrated from Germany. When Joseph turned four years old the family moved to New York and at 19 years old he graduated from Columbia University. Then he found a job at the UFA translating and subtitling films from German into English. Before becoming a director, Joseph's brother Hermann won an Oscar writing with Orson Welles Citizen Kane, in 1941. His first film is Dragonwyck in 1946, with Vincent Price, while the first film worth mentioning is The Ghost and Ms. Muir the following year, but we must remind that the director has directed four films in just two years. The following year Escape, with Rex Harrison, has positive critics and between 1950 and 1951 something that would have never happened to another director happened: he won four Oscars in two years, two for Best Director and two for Best Screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. In the meantime, the prolific Joseph had also shot House of Strangers, in 1949, and No Way Out in 1950. He easily moved from sophisticated comedy such as People Will Talk with Cary Grant in 1951 to a great movie about ancient Rome as Julius Caesar, with a great Marlon Brando in the role of Mark Anthony. From a drama like The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner to a musical as Guys and Dolls. After The Quiet American, in 1958, he directed one of his most beautiful films: Suddenly, Last Summer with the Clift, Hepburn and Taylor trio. In the Sixties he directed the super blockbuster Cleopatra with Liz Taylor and The Honey Pot with Rex Harrison and Susan Hayward. He beautifully ended with two films to be remembered for a long time, There was a Crooked Man..., a great western with Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda in 1970, and Sleuth, a Kammerspiel thriller with another great couple: Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier (in 2007 Kenneth Branagh will make a remake of this one).
