Irving H. Rapper

Irving H. Rapper was a British-born actor, stage director, and film director born on 16 January 1898 in London to a Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States, where he studied at New York University and established himself as both a performer and director on Broadway. His verified Broadway credits include an appearance in the 1927 play Crime.

Rapper transitioned from the stage to Hollywood in 1936, joining Warner Bros. as an assistant director and dialogue coach. His facility with language made him particularly useful in working alongside directors for whom English was not a first language. He made his feature directorial debut with the 1941 film Shining Victory, with Bette Davis appearing in the picture as a personal gesture of support. That same year, his film One Foot in Heaven received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Rapper directed Davis in four additional films following Shining Victory: Now, Voyager in 1942, The Corn Is Green in 1945, Deception in 1946, and Another Man's Poison in 1952. Now, Voyager was selected in 2007 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Among his other Warner Bros. productions were The Voice of the Turtle in 1947 and The Glass Menagerie in 1950.

Outside of Warner Bros., Rapper directed The Brave One in 1956, a film centered on a Mexican boy attempting to save his bull from a matador. The screenplay, written by the then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, earned Trumbo an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay despite the film's poor box office performance. Additional credits include Marjorie Morningstar in 1958 and The Miracle in 1959, a remake of the 1912 hand-coloured black-and-white film of the same name.

Rapper also directed several biographical films throughout his career, among them The Adventures of Mark Twain in 1944, Rhapsody in Blue in 1945, Pontius Pilate as co-director in 1962, The Christine Jorgensen Story in 1970, and Born Again in 1978, his final film, which depicted the life of convicted Watergate conspirator and former Nixon aide Charles Colson. Rapper died on 20 December 1999 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where he had resided for four years, at the age of 101.