Gabriel Pascal was born Gabor Lehel on 4 June 1894 in Arad, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire.
27 Facts About Gabriel Pascal
2.
Gabriel Pascal claimed to have been an orphan taken from a burning building as a child and raised first by Gypsies before being put into an orphanage.
3.
Gabriel Pascal claimed that the Gypsies taught him to beg, steal, and do acrobatic tricks.
4.
Gabriel Pascal had one son, Peter, conceived in Germany with his landlady's sister Elsie, during the delirium of a fever.
5.
Unable to care even for himself, Gabriel Pascal fled to the Netherlands.
6.
Gabriel Pascal had another auspicious encounter when he was young while walking along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
7.
Gabriel Pascal was impressed when Pascal immediately did so, and this began their friendship.
8.
Gabriel Pascal began his producing career making silent movies in Italy for German distribution through UFA Studios in Berlin.
9.
In 1934, during a trip to Hollywood, Gabriel Pascal was contacted by Princess Norina Matchabelli about a film project based on the teachings of Meher Baba.
10.
Gabriel Pascal became very interested in this project, bringing writers Hy Kraft and Karl Vollmoller into helping him work up treatments and even making a trip to India to discuss the project further with Meher Baba.
11.
Gabriel Pascal invited Pascal to travel with him in India.
12.
Gabriel Pascal took a liking to Meher Baba and maintained a correspondence with him for the rest of his life.
13.
Gabriel Pascal remained in close correspondence with his master Meher Baba until the end of his life; he met with him for the last time in 1952 in Scarsdale, New York.
14.
Thirty years before Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, Gabriel Pascal had a written agreement with Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, to produce a movie of Gandhi's life.
15.
Gabriel Pascal took a ship back from India to the United States, penniless but undaunted.
16.
Gabriel Pascal landed in San Francisco where he spent some time deciding what to do next.
17.
Gabriel Pascal decided to approach playwright George Bernard Shaw, whom he had met many years earlier.
18.
Gabriel Pascal sought out Shaw, first by going to New York City hidden in the toilet of a railroad train, then convincing a sea captain to give him a lift to England.
19.
Gabriel Pascal tried to convince Shaw to let Pygmalion be turned into a musical, but the outraged Shaw explicitly forbade it, having had a bad experience with the operetta The Chocolate Soldier.
20.
Gabriel Pascal was the only person to convince Shaw to adjust his scripts to the new medium of cinema, gaining concessions from Shaw that no one else could.
21.
In 1938, Gabriel Pascal was named as one of the world's more famous men by Time magazine, along with Adolf Hitler and the pope.
22.
Gabriel Pascal followed the film Pygmalion with Major Barbara, which he directed as well as produced.
23.
Gabriel Pascal never stopped the production, and the film was completed on schedule.
24.
Gabriel Pascal became more and more extravagant: Caesar and Cleopatra, the next Gabriel Pascal film of a Shaw play, was the most expensive British movie ever made at that time.
25.
Gabriel Pascal insisted on importing sand from Egypt to achieve the right cinematic colors for the film.
26.
Gabriel Pascal is doing for films what Diaghileff did for the Russian Balle.
27.
Gabriel Pascal produced Androcles and the Lion, but by this time he was suffering from cancer.