20 Facts About Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk's work is seen as a "critique of the bourgeoisie in general and of 1950s America in particular", while painting a "compassionate portrait of characters trapped by social conditions".

Beyond the surface of the film, Douglas Sirk worked with complex mises-en-scene and lush Technicolor to underline his statements.

Douglas Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck on 26 April 1897, in Hamburg, of Danish parentage; his father was a newspaper reporter.

Douglas Sirk spent a few years in Denmark as a child, before his parents returned to Germany and became citizens.

Douglas Sirk discovered the theatre in his mid-teens, particularly Shakespeare's history plays, and began to frequent the cinema, where he first encountered what he later described as "dramas of swollen emotions"; one of his early screen favourites was Danish-born actress Asta Nielsen.

Douglas Sirk continued his studies for a time at the University of Jena before transferring to Hamburg University, where he switched to philosophy and the history of art.

In 1922, substituting for a director who had fallen sick, Douglas Sirk directed his first production, the Hermann Bossdorf play Bahnmeister Tod, which became a surprise success, and from that point Douglas Sirk was "lost to the theatre".

Douglas Sirk joined UFA studios in 1934, where he directed three shorts, followed by his first feature, April, April, which was filmed in both German and Dutch versions.

Douglas Sirk left Germany in 1937 because of his political leanings and his Jewish wife, actress Hilde Jary.

Douglas Sirk briefly returned to Germany after the war ended, but returned to the US and established his reputation with a series of lush, colorful melodramas for Universal-International Pictures from 1952 to 1959: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Battle Hymn, The Tarnished Angels, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and Imitation of Life.

Douglas Sirk died in Lugano, Switzerland, nearly 30 years later, with only a brief return behind the camera in Germany in the 1970s, teaching at the film school Hochschule fur Fernsehen und Film in Munich.

Douglas Sirk's films were considered unimportant, banal and unrealistic.

Attitudes toward Douglas Sirk's films changed drastically in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as his work was re-examined by French, American, and British critics.

The major critical reappraisal of Sirk began in France with the April 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinema, which included an extended interview with Sirk by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames, an appreciation by Jean-Louis Comolli, and a "biofilmographie" compiled by Patrick Brion and Dominique Rabourdin.

Several major revival seasons of Douglas Sirk's films followed over the next few years, including a 20-film retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, which generated a book of essays.

In 1974 the University of Connecticut Film Society programmed a complete retrospective of the director's American films, and invited Douglas Sirk to attend, but on the way to the airport, for the flight to New York, Douglas Sirk suffered a haemorrhage that seriously impaired the vision in his left eye.

Douglas Sirk's reputation was helped by a widespread nostalgia for old-fashioned Hollywood films in the 1970s.

Douglas Sirk's work is widely considered to show excellent control of visuals, extending from lighting and framing to costumes and sets that are saturated with symbolism and shot through with subtle barbs of irony.

Douglas Sirk's films have been quoted in films by directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, later, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-wai, David Lynch, John Waters and Lars von Trier.

Tarantino paid homage to Sirk and his melodramatic style in Pulp Fiction, when character Vincent Vega, at a '50s-themed restaurant, orders the "Douglas Sirk steak" cooked "bloody as hell".