King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose 67-year film-making career successfully spanned the silent and sound eras.
95 Facts About King Vidor
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King Vidor's works are distinguished by a vivid, humane, and sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues.
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King Vidor's most acclaimed and successful film in the silent era is The Big Parade.
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King Vidor was considered an "actors' director": many of his players received Academy Award nominations or awards, among them Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, Anne Shirley, and Lillian Gish.
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King Vidor was nominated five times by the Academy Awards for Best Director.
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King Vidor was born into a well-to-do family in Galveston, Texas, the son of Kate and Charles Shelton King Vidor, a lumber importer and mill owner.
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King Vidor's grandfather, Karoly Charles Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s.
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King Vidor's mother, Kate Wallis, of Scotch-English descent, was a relative of the second wife of iconic frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett.
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The "King" in King Vidor is no sobriquet, but his given name in honor of his mother's favorite brother, King Wallis.
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At the age of six, King Vidor witnessed the devastation of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
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King Vidor was introduced to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science by his mother at a very early age.
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At the age of sixteen King Vidor dropped out of a private high school in Maryland and returned to Galveston to work as a Nickelodeon ticket taker and projectionist.
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King Vidor sold footage from a Houston army parade to a newsreel outfit and made his first fictional movie, a semi-docucomedy concerning a local automobile race, In Tow.
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King Vidor obtained minor roles acting at Vitagraph and Inceville studios.
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In 1918, at the age of 24, King Vidor directed his first Hollywood feature, The Turn in the Road, a film presentation of a Christian Science evangelical tract sponsored by a group of doctors and dentists affiliated as the independent Brentwood Film Corporation.
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King Vidor would make three more films for the Brentwood Corporation, all of which featured as yet unknown comedienne Zasu Pitts, who the director had discovered on a Hollywood streetcar.
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King Vidor ended his association with the Brentwood group in 1920.
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King Vidor next embarked on a major project in collaboration with a New York-based film exhibitor First National.
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King Vidor issued a founding statement entitled "Creed and Pledge" that set forth moral anodynes for film-making, inspired by his Christian Science sympathies.
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King Vidor's "manifesto" was carried in Variety magazine's January 1920 issue.
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The first production from King Vidor Village was his The Jack Knife Man, a bleak and bitter story of an orphaned boy raised by an impoverished yet kindly hermit, performed by former stage actor Fred Turner.
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King Vidor's The Sky Pilot was a big-budget western-comedy shot on location in the high Sierra Nevada of California.
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In 1922, King Vidor produced and directed films that served as vehicles for his spouse, Florence King Vidor, notable only for their "artificiality".
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King Vidor's next picture, Conquering the Woman, was an unabashed imitation of DeMille's outstanding drama Male and Female, starring Gloria Swanson.
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King Vidor followed up with Woman, Wake Up and The Real Adventure and each depicting a female struggling successfully to assert herself in a male dominated world.
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King Vidor Village went bankrupt in 1922 and King Vidor, now without a studio, offered his services to the top executives in the film industry.
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Griffth, King Vidor was anxious that the aging Taylor was born on 1884 and would not be convincing as her 18-year-old stage character on screen.
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At the first sight of Laurette [King Vidor] experienced acute relief.
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King Vidor came toward him smiling, and his camera-minded eye saw at once a face all round and animated, essentially youthful.
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King Vidor was content to adapt these "prestigious properties" so securing his reputation as a reliable studio asset.
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King Vidor directed him in His Hour, based on an Elinor Glyn "febrile romance", and is one of the few films from King Vidor's output of that period to survive.
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In 1925 King Vidor directed The Big Parade, among the most acclaimed films of the silent era, and a tremendous commercial success.
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In 1928, King Vidor received an Oscar nomination, and his first for Best Director.
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King Vidor was shaken by news that US film studios and theaters were converting to sound technology and he returned quickly to Hollywood, concerned about the impact on silent cinema.
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King Vidor quickly completed writing the scenario for Hallelujah and began recruiting an all African-American cast.
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King Vidor, a third-generation Texan, encountered black workers employed at his father's sawmills when he was a child, and there he became familiar with their spirituals.
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The black sharecroppers resemble more the poor white agrarian entrepreneurs King Vidor praised in his 1934 Our Daily Bread, emphasizing the class, rather than race, of his subjects.
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King Vidor was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards of 1929.
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King Vidor owed M-G-M a more conventional and "fool-proof" production after executives allowed him to make the more experimental Street Scene in 1931.
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King Vidor divorced his wife, actress Eleanor Boardman shortly after Bird of Paradise was completed.
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King Vidor's expressed enthusiasm for the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's exhortation in his first inaugural in 1933 for a shift of labor from industry to agriculture.
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King Vidor continued his "back to the land" theme in his 1934 Our Daily Bread.
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Our Daily Bread is a deeply personal and politically controversial work that King Vidor financed himself when M-G-M executives declined to back the production.
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Goldwyn's effort to elevate Sten to the stature of Dietrich or Garbo had thus far failed despite his relentless promotion when King Vidor began directing her in The Wedding Night.
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In 1937 King Vidor made his final and most profitable picture with Samuel Goldwyn: Stella Dallas.
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Stanwyck's performance, reportedly without undue oversight by King Vidor, is outstanding, benefited by her selective vetting of Belle Bennett's famous portrayal.
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King Vidor contributed to defining Stanwyck's role substantially in the final cut, providing a sharper focus on her character and delivering one of the great tear-jerkers in film history.
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King Vidor emphatically declined to work with the "mercurial" producer again.
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King Vidor, initially tapped to direct Mitchell's epic, was ultimately assigned to director George Cukor.
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King Vidor further invested six months shooting an Amazon River survival-adventure, The Witch in the Wilderness from which he was diverted to perform pre-production for Northwest Passage.
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King Vidor's Christian Science-inspired detachment from the medical profession influence his handling of the story, in which an independent doctor's cooperative is favored over both socialized medicine and a profit-driven medical establishment.
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King Vidor began filming in July 1939, just weeks before war was declared in Europe and the isolationist or interventionist policies were widely debated.
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King Vidor established an unusually close professional relationship with the film's star, Spencer Tracy and the actor delivered what King Vidor considered a performance of "tremendous conviction".
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King Vidor used the new three-strip Technicolor camera system.
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An American Romance: Rather than demonstrate his patriotism by joining a military film unit King Vidor attempted to create a paean to American democracy.
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Disgusted by M-G-M's mutilations, King Vidor terminated his 20-year association with the studio.
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The failure of An American Romance, after an artistic investment of three years, staggered King Vidor and left him deeply demoralized.
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King Vidor walked off the set just before primary filming was completed, unhappy with Selznick's intrusive management.
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King Vidor was awarded sole screen credit after Directors Guild arbitration.
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King Vidor was compelled to insist that Griffith withdraw, and the chastened Griffith complied graciously.
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King Vidor dismissed the film from his oeuvre in later years.
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In 1948 Vidor was diverted from making a series of 16mm Westerns for television and produced on his ranch when Warner Brothers studios approached him to direct an adaption of author Ayn Rand's controversial novel The Fountainhead.
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The Fountainhead : Unhappy with the screen adaption offered by Warner Brothers for Ayn Rand's 1938 novel, The Fountainhead King Vidor asked the author to write the script.
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Satisfied with his experience at Warner's, King Vidor signed a two-film contract with the studio.
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Lightning Strikes Twice : His final picture for Warner Brothers, King Vidor attempted to create a film noir tale of a deadly love triangle starring Richard Todd, Ruth Roman and Mercedes McCambridge, a cast that did not suit King Vidor.
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King Vidor is harried by her evangelical preacher-sibling and her love affair with the son of a local land-owing scion leads to a deadly shootout, a climax that recalls Vidor's violent 1946 Western.
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King Vidor deferred his own salary to make the low-budget work, filming the "North Carolina" landscapes on his California ranch.
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In 1953, King Vidor's autobiography entitled A Tree is a Tree was published and widely praised.
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King Vidor knows that the purpose of his life cannot be stated in terms of ultimate oblivion.
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King Vidor's contributions included "A Kiss for the Lieutenant" by author Arthur Gordon starring Kim Novak, an amusing romantic vignette, as well as an adaption of novelist John Steinbeck's short story "Leader of the People" in which a retired wagon-master, Walter Brennan, rebuffed by his son Harry Morgan, finds a sympathetic audience for his War Horse reminiscences about the Old West in his grandson Brandon deWilde.
71.
King Vidor failed to fully develop his thematic conception, the ideal of balancing personal freedoms with conservation of the land as a heritage.
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Man Without a Star, rated as "a minor work" by biographer John Baxter, marks a philosophical transition in King Vidor's outlook towards Hollywood: the Dempsey Rae figure, though retaining his personal integrity, "is a man without a star to follow; no ideal, no goal" reflecting a declining enthusiasm by the director for American topics.
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Contrary to his aesthetic aversion to adapting historical spectaculars, in 1955 King Vidor accepted independent Italian producer Dino De Laurentis's offer to create a screen adaption of Leo Tolstoy's vast historical romance of the late-Napoleonic era, War and Peace.
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King Vidor was overruled by Dino de Laurentis, who insisted that the central figure in the epic appear as a conventional romantic leading man, rather than as the novel's "overweight, bespectacled" protagonist.
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King Vidor sought to endow Pierre's character so as to reflect the central theme of Tolstoy's novel: an individual's troubled striving to rediscover essential moral truths.
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King Vidor was delighted with the vitality of Audrey Hepburn's performance as Natasha Rostova, in contrast to the miscasting of the male leads.
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King Vidor represents, to me, the anima of the story and she hovers over it all like immortality itself.
78.
King Vidor performed second-production duties to oversee the spectacular battle reenactments and director Mario Soldati shot a number of scenes with the principal cast.
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King Vidor finally settled on the Old Testament story of Solomon and Sheba, with Tyrone Power and Gina Lollobrigida tapped as the star-crossed monarchs.
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King Vidor was bereft of an actor who had grasped the complex nature of the Solomon figure, adding depth to Powers' performance.
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King Vidor's troops turn their burnished shields to the sun, the reflected light blinding the enemy hordes and sending them careening into an abyss.
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Conquest : In 1960, King Vidor resumed efforts to make sound version of his 1919 The Turn in the Road.
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King Vidor's reconceived screenplay concerns a Hollywood director disillusioned with the film industry who inherits a gas station from his father in the fictional Colorado town of "Arcadia".
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The Crowd: King Vidor developed revisions of his 1928 silent masterpiece, including a 1960s sequel of Ann Head's 1967 novel Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones, and in the early 1970s another effort, Brother Jon.
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The Actor: In 1979, King Vidor sought financing for a biography of the "ill-fated" James Murray, star of King Vidor's The Crowd.
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The movie was shot and released in 1967 as Cervantes, but King Vidor withdrew his name from the production.
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William Desmond Taylor: King Vidor researched the murder of silent era actor-director William Desmond Taylor, killed under mysterious circumstances in 1922.
88.
King Vidor did not appear as a featured actor until 1981, at the age of 85.
89.
King Vidor provided a "charming" tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Walter Klein, a senile grandfather in director James Toback's Love and Money.
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Love and Money was released in 1982, shortly before King Vidor died of heart failure.
91.
King Vidor published his autobiography, A Tree is a Tree, in 1953.
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King Vidor wanted to film a movie in the locations where its story was set, a decision which would have greatly added to the film's production budget.
93.
King Vidor was a Christian Scientist and wrote occasionally for church publications.
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King Vidor died at age 88 of a heart ailment at his ranch in Paso Robles, California, on November 1,1982.
95.
In 2020, King Vidor was honored with a retrospective at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, showcasing more than 30 of his films.