39 Facts About Joseph Losey

Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter.

Joseph Losey was a four-time nominee for both the and the Golden Lion, and a two-time BAFTA nominee.

Joseph Walton Losey III was born on January 14,1909, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he and Nicholas Ray were high-school classmates at La Crosse Central High School.

Joseph Losey attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama.

Joseph Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933.

Joseph Losey declined to direct a staged version of Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, which led Lewis to offer him his first work written for the stage, Jayhawker.

Joseph Losey visited the Soviet Union for several months in 1935, to study the Russian stage.

Joseph Losey met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time.

Joseph Losey then directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted.

Joseph Losey served in the US military during World War II and was discharged in 1945.

On October 30,1947, Joseph Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington DC for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Joseph Losey went on to stage Galileo, again with Laughton in the title role, in New York City where it opened on December 7,1947, at the Maxine Elliott Theatre.

Joseph Losey's first feature film was a political allegory titled The Boy with Green Hair, starring a young Dean Stockwell as Peter, a war orphan who is subject to ridicule after he awakens one morning to find his hair mysteriously turned green.

Joseph Losey had collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and had a long association with Hanns Eisler, both targets of HUAC's interest.

Joseph Losey had written to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of a resident visa for Eisler, who had many radical associations.

Joseph Losey had worked on the Federal Theatre Project, long a target of HUAC.

Joseph Losey directed the play Triple-A Plowed Under, which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as communist propaganda.

Joseph Losey was under a long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO when Howard Hughes purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists.

Joseph Losey later explained how Hughes tested employees to determine whether they had communist sympathies:.

Joseph Losey's name was mentioned by two witnesses before HUAC in the spring of 1951.

Joseph Losey's attorney suggested arranging a deal with the committee for testimony in secret.

Joseph Losey returned briefly to Rome and settled in London on January 4,1953.

Joseph Losey settled in Britain and worked as a director of genre films.

Joseph Losey's films covered a wide range from the Regency melodrama The Gypsy and the Gentleman to the gangster film The Criminal.

Joseph Losey was originally slated to direct the Hammer Films production X the Unknown, but after a few days' work the star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Joseph Losey was removed from the project.

An alternative version is that Joseph Losey was replaced due to illness.

Joseph Losey directed three enduring classics based on Pinter's screenplays: The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between.

All three films are marked by Pinter's sparse, elliptical and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Joseph Losey often develops a visual correlate for by means of dense and cluttered mise-en-scene and peripatetic camera work.

In 1966, Joseph Losey directed Modesty Blaise, a comedy spy-fi film produced in the United Kingdom and released worldwide in 1966.

Joseph Losey directed Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell in the British action film Figures in a Landscape, adapted by Shaw from the novel by Barry England.

Joseph Losey worked with Pinter on The Proust Screenplay, an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.

In 1975, Joseph Losey realized a long-planned film adaptation of Brecht's Galileo released as Life of Galileo starring Chaim Topol.

Joseph Losey said he so completely rejected naturalism in film that in this case he divided his shooting schedule into three "visual categories": Unreality, Reality and Abstract.

Joseph Losey demonstrated a facility for working in the French language and Monsieur Klein gave Alain Delon as star and producer one of French cinema's earliest chances to highlight the background to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of French Jews in July 1942.

In 1979, Joseph Losey filmed Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, shot in Villa La Rotonda and the Veneto region of Italy; this film was nominated for several Cesar Awards in 1980, including Best Director.

From 1956 to 1963, Joseph Losey was married to British actress Dorothy Bromiley.

On September 29,1970, Joseph Losey married Patricia Mohan in King's Lynn, Norfolk, shortly after finishing shooting The Go-Between.

Patricia Joseph Losey went on to adapt Lorenzo Da Ponte's opera libretto for Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni and Nell Dunn's play for Steaming.

Joseph Losey died at his home in London on June 22,1984, following a brief illness, four weeks after completing his last film.