1. Nicholas Ray is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963, including They Live By Night, In A Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, Bigger Than Life, and King of Kings, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death.
Nicholas Ray grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the home town of future fellow director Joseph Losey.
Nicholas Ray studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College for two years before earning the requisite grades to apply for admission to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931.
Nicholas Ray briefly re-enrolled at the State Teachers College in the fall of that year.
Nicholas Ray cultivated a relationship with Wright in order to win an invitation to join "the Fellowship," as the community of Wright "apprentices" was known.
In late 1933 Wright asked Nicholas Ray to organize the newly built Hillside Playhouse, a room at Taliesin dedicated to musical and dramatic performances.
Briefly billing himself as Nik Nicholas Ray, he acted in several productions, collaborating with a number of performers, some of whom he later cast in his films, including Will Lee and Curt Conway, and some who became friends for life, including Elia Kazan.
Nicholas Ray was employed by the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration.
Nicholas Ray befriended folklorist Alan Lomax and traveled with him through rural America, collecting traditional vernacular music.
In 1944, heading to Hollywood to direct A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan suggested Nicholas Ray go west, too, and hired him as an assistant on the production.
Also through Houseman, Nicholas Ray had the opportunity to work in television, one of his few forays into the new medium.
When Lute Song called on Houseman's time and attention, Nicholas Ray took over the task of staging the broadcast, which aired on January 30,1946.
The next year, Nicholas Ray directed his first film, They Live by Night, for RKO Pictures.
Nicholas Ray's staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film.
In January 1949, Nicholas Ray was announced as set to direct I Married a Communist, a litmus test that RKO head Howard Hughes had concocted to weed out Communists at the studio.
Nicholas Ray made films in conventionalized genres, including Westerns and melodramas, as well as others that resisted easy categorization.
Between feature-length projects, and after shooting another Western, Run For Cover, starring James Cagney, Ray was asked to take on a television film for G E Theater.
Nicholas Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film.
In 1956, Nicholas Ray was chosen to direct the melodrama Bigger Than Life at Twentieth Century-Fox by the film's star and producer, James Mason, who played an elementary-school teacher, stricken with a rare circulatory ailment, and driven delusional by his abuse of a new wonder drug, Cortisone.
In 1957, completing a two-picture deal, Nicholas Ray reluctantly directed The True Story of Jesse James, a remake of the 1939 Fox release, Jesse James.
Nicholas Ray wanted to cast Elvis Presley as the legendary bandit, and Presley had made his first film, Love Me Tender, at the studio.
An epic-scale production, with Italian backing and distribution by Paramount, Nicholas Ray began shooting the film, with lead Anthony Quinn, in the brutal cold of northern Manitoba and on Baffin Island, but much of the footage was lost in a plane crash.
Nicholas Ray had to use process photography to replace the lost location scenes, when the production moved to Rome, as planned, for studio work.
Now largely based in Europe, Nicholas Ray signed on to direct producer Samuel Bronston's life of Christ as a replacement for the original director, John Farrow.
Nicholas Ray was replaced by Andrew Marton, a highly regarded second-unit director fresh off another runaway spectacle, Cleopatra, with some of Heston's final scenes with Gardner directed by Guy Green, at Heston's request.
Nicholas Ray was credited as director, and represented the film, his last mainstream motion picture, at its May 1963 premiere in London.
Nicholas Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s, and after 55 Days at Peking, he did not direct again until the 1970s, though he continued to try to develop projects while in Europe.
Nicholas Ray attempted an adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea, first with Ingrid Bergman in mind, and later Romy Schneider.
Nicholas Ray struck up a deal with Avala Film, the largest production company in Yugoslavia, to back that film and three others, leading him from London to Zagreb.
Production was announced as starting on September 1,1965, amended to October 21, with Maximilian Schell, Susannah York and Geraldine Chaplin in the cast, but Nicholas Ray insisted on rewrites, asking, among others, John Fowles, who declined, and Gore Vidal, who in retrospect wondered why he agreed.
Nicholas Ray tried in vain to enlist US investment, by Seven Arts and Warner Bros.
Accounts of the productions failure vary, including the assertion that on the first day of shooting, Nicholas Ray was out of the country, and the conclusion that he was paralysed by doubt and indecision.
Dave Wallis's novel, Only Lovers Left Alive, was the second property that Nicholas Ray tried to develop as an Emerald Films venture.
Nicholas Ray made the German island Sylt his base of operations and imagined projects that might be shot there, including one to star Jane Fonda and Paul Newman, titled Go Where You Want, Die As You Must, a production that would demand 2,000 extras.
Nicholas Ray had been introduced to Volker Schlondorff by Hanne Axmann, who had starred in Schlondorff's first film, and Ray brokered a deal to sell his second, Mord und Totschlag, to Universal Pictures, pocketing about one-third of the money as his fee and for expenses.
Similarly, Nicholas Ray enticed Schroeder's friend Stephane Tchalgadjieff to raise funding for L'Evade, a story about mixed and assumed identities, and Tchalgadjieff raised a half-million dollars, only for Nicholas Ray to manoeuvre him out, and for nothing to emerge from the enterprise.
Rather than the strict division of labour characteristic of his Hollywood career, Nicholas Ray devised a rotation in which a student would take on different roles behind or in front of the camera.
Two documentaries provide records of Ray's methods and the work of his class: the near-contemporary biography, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: A Portrait of Nicholas Ray, directed by David Helpern Jr.
Nicholas Ray shot additional scenes in Amsterdam, shortly after the Cannes screening, in New York in January 1974, and two months later in San Francisco, and edited a second version, with the hopes of attracting a distributor in 1976.
Nicholas Ray was able to continue teaching acting and directing, at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University, where his teaching assistant was graduate student Jim Jarmusch.
Nicholas Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1977, though he may have contracted the disease several years earlier.
Nicholas Ray was treated with cobalt therapy, and in April 1978 radioactive particles were implanted as treatment.
Nicholas Ray survived another year, dying of heart failure on June 16,1979, in New York City.
Nicholas Ray's ashes were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Further, Nicholas Ray is considered a central figure in the development of auteur theory itself.
Nicholas Ray was often singled out by Cahiers du cinema critics who coined the term to designate exemplars of film directors who worked in Hollywood, and whose work had a recognizable and distinctive stamp seen to transcend the standardized industrial system in which they were produced.
Nicholas Ray frequently made films characterized by their examination of outsider figures, and most of his movies implicitly or explicitly critique conformity.
Nicholas Ray's films have been noted for their stylized mise en scene with carefully choreographed blocking and composition that often emphasizes architecture.
Nicholas Ray remembered that when shooting his first film, the editor encouraged him to "shoot double reverses", which he did, strategically, in several sequences of They Live By Night, In A Lonely Place, and other of his Hollywood films.
Nicholas Ray moved to Chicago and married a scientist, but indulged her love of the arts as an avid audience member.
Increasingly unmanageable after his father's death, Ray was sent to Chicago to live with his sister Ruth and enroll in Robert A Waller High, returning to La Crosse Central midway through his final year.
Nicholas Ray played football and basketball, and was a cheerleader, perhaps more social activities than athletic commitments.
Gifted with a mellifluous, deep voice Nicholas Ray won a scholarship to be an announcer at the local radio station, WKBH, for a year, while he was enrolled in La Crosse Teachers College.
Nicholas Ray reported that the summer following, he joined a troupe of stunt fliers, but of working with an airborne bootlegger.
In due course, Nicholas Ray led the Buskins, and started dressing the role of an early twentieth-century aesthete.
Nicholas Ray fostered other proclivities that would persist through most of his life.
Nicholas Ray had improved his record and was eligible to transfer in Fall 1931.
Nicholas Ray was pledged to a fraternity and played some football, but by his own account he was more committed to the elements of college life that included drinking and pursuing college girls.
When Nicholas Ray took a position at the WPA in Washington, by January 1937 they had moved to Arlington, Virginia.
Nicholas Ray committed himself for a time to psychoanalysis, but in time fell back into old habits.
Nicholas Ray had been rejected for military service on medical grounds but worked for the Office of War Information, under John Houseman.
Nicholas Ray stated that he had discovered Grahame in bed with his son, Tony, who was 13 years old at the time.
Nicholas Ray directed additional scenes, but evidently none in which she was featured.
Grahame filed for divorce, and she testified in court that Nicholas Ray had struck her twice, once at a party and once in private, at home, before the divorce was granted, on August 15,1952.
Gloria Grahame and Tony Nicholas Ray married in 1960 and divorced in 1974.
Nicholas Ray left her troubled marriage to actor Edward Tierney to live with Ray at, by her account, a desultory time for him, of drinking, gin rummy and analysis that did him little good.
Nicholas Ray did not make good on that promise, though they remained in touch and friends for years thereafter.
Nicholas Ray himself was busy with roommates Monroe and Winters, Genevieve Aumont, and even Lew Wasserman's wife, Edie, while interested in Jayne Mansfield, whom he tested for the role Wood won in Rebel.
None of those plans materialized, with Dean's death in a car crash, on September 30,1955, that left Nicholas Ray devastated and bereft.
Nicholas Ray denied this in 1977, responding to a question about Nicholas Ray's use of James Dean's "probable bisexuality" in a sequence of Rebel Without a Cause involving Dean and Sal Mineo.
The connections to Nicholas Ray, who had grown increasingly dependent on both alcohol and drugs, were not lost, even on Nicholas Ray.
Nicholas Ray subsequently did not hear from him for almost three years, when he called her to come to his Chateau Marmont bungalow for an assignation.
Nicholas Ray then disappeared again, until 1956, when he called again.
In 1958, she won a place as one of the chorines in Party Girl, and after shooting ended they eloped to Maine, where Nicholas Ray hoped to start his third marriage by drying out.
Nicholas Ray recovered sufficiently to travel on to Kennebunkport, where the couple spent several weeks, before marrying on October 13,1958.
In early 1963, the family moved from Rome to Madrid, where Nicholas Ray used money from his Samuel Bronston contract to try to develop projects, which never came to fruition.
Nicholas Ray continued his chronic habits: too many drinks and pills, too little sleep.
Wherever he went, his friends and acquaintances were accustomed to Nicholas Ray cadging a handout.
Nicholas Ray returned to the United States on November 14,1969, landing in Washington, DC just in time for the second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.
The project had mutated from a documentary to a strange dramatic reconstruction, for which Nicholas Ray considered casting Dustin Hoffman or Groucho Marx or the long-retired James Cagney, as the trial judge, Julius Hoffman.
In Taos, Nicholas Ray asked Susan to marry him, giving her his ring, and in return she gave him a pearl.
The event he presented convinced Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs that Nicholas Ray should join them on faculty in the Cinema Department, then one of the epicenters of experimental film in the US.
Nicholas Ray then rented a farmhouse, and the hours that students spent there, time that he demanded of them, turned it into a communal living and working situation, redolent of his Chateau Marmont bungalow while making Rebel Without A Cause, or, before that, the 1930s New York scene of political theatre and music, though with cannabis and harder drugs added to alcohol and creativity as fuel.
Jacobs and Gottheim worked within the largely non-narrative and to varying degrees poetic and formalist realm of experimental film, while Nicholas Ray's background was in drama and mainstream narrative cinema.
Nicholas Ray's goal was to work on We Can't Go Home Again, in order to screen it at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 1973.
Nicholas Ray started in Los Angeles, where he wound up back in Bungalow 2 at the Chateau Marmont, running up bills and seeking investment from his old Hollywood connections.
Susan returned to New York, and Nicholas Ray stayed awhile on a boat owned by Sterling Hayden, his "Johnny Guitar," from almost twenty years before.
Nicholas Ray travelled to Amsterdam, shooting a segment, The Janitor, for the feature-length Wet Dreams, a softcore anthology produced by Max Fischer.
Nicholas Ray returned to New York by the end of the year, but in March 1974 he went back west, to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nicholas Ray lived in a spare room at archive curator Tom Luddy's residence and worked overnight shifts in the editing rooms of Francis Coppola's Zoetrope facility, and, after he wore out that welcome, at the film collective CIne Manifest.
Later in 1974, Nicholas Ray returned to Southern California, to stay with his ex-wife Betty and their daughters, Julie, now fourteen, and Nicca, almost thirteen, whom he had not seen since they left Spain, ten years previous.
Nicholas Ray arranged for a house where he could stop drinking, but soon determined that he needed medical supervision and had him admitted to the detoxification unit at Los Angeles County Hospital.
Nicholas Ray resumed using even persuading his older daughter to buy cocaine for him.
Nicholas Ray was deeply saddened by Sal mineo's passing and attended his funeral in February 1976.
And, shortly after, he returned to New York City, where he was offered the opportunity to direct a film starring Marilyn Chambers and Rip Torn, which Nicholas Ray titled City Blues, but financing fell through by July 1976, and the project never materialised.
Nicholas Ray continued to drink and abuse drugs heavily, and found himself in and out of hospital, with a variety of maladies and injuries due to impairment.
Nicholas Ray remained for ninety days, and was discharged early in November 1976.
Nicholas Ray started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and he and Susan moved into a Soho loft, at 167 Spring Street.
In early 1977, Nicholas Ray started to realize some new opportunities.
Nicholas Ray was frail and coughed painfully and he had lost his hair; yet he was still active, and was hired to teach another summer workshop at NYU.
Nicholas Ray assigned Ray a teaching assistant, soon to become a friend, Jim Jarmusch.
Nicholas Ray was visited by friends including Kazan, Connie Bessie, Alan Lomax and his first wife, Jean, as well as students from Harpur College, and his more recent students.
Nicholas Ray died in hospital of heart failure on June 16,1979.
Nicholas Ray was survived by two sisters, Helen and Alice, and his ashes were returned to La Crosse, Wisconsin, his hometown, and interred in the same section of Oak Grove Cemetery as his parents.