Otto Preminger

Otto Preminger was an Austrian-American director, producer, and actor born in 1905 in Wischnitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary, a city in present-day Ukraine. He came from a Jewish family; his father, Markus Preminger, was a lawyer who eventually rose to a prominent prosecutorial position, and his mother was Josefa, née Fraenkel. His younger brother Ingwald, known as Ingo, later produced the original film version of M*A*S*H in 1970. When Russian forces invaded Bukovina following the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the family fled, settling first in Graz and then in Vienna, where Preminger would spend his formative years. He earned a law degree from the University of Vienna in 1928, though his ambitions had long since turned toward the theater.

Preminger's theatrical career began in earnest in 1923, when he sought an apprenticeship under the renowned Viennese-born director Max Reinhardt. After weeks of unanswered letters requesting an audition, Preminger abandoned his efforts, unaware that a reply had arrived inviting him to audition on a date he had already missed by two days. He eventually secured a place in Reinhardt's company, and when Reinhardt's theater opened on April 1, 1924, Preminger appeared in a production of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. The following month he appeared in The Merchant of Venice alongside William Dieterle, who would later also move to Hollywood. Fellow company members during that period included Mady Christians and Nora Gregor. Preminger eventually left the Reinhardt fold to pursue directing, taking on assignments in Aussig that ranged from the Wedekind Lulu plays to the melodramatic Sergei Tretyakov work Roar China. Between 1931 and 1935 he directed twenty-six productions. In 1930 he also directed his first film, Die große Liebe, which premiered at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on December 21, 1931, to strong reviews. On August 3, 1931, he married Marion Mill, a Hungarian woman, thirty minutes after her divorce from her previous husband was finalized.

In April 1935, American film producer Joseph Schenck, co-founder of Twentieth Century-Fox alongside Darryl F. Zanuck, met with Preminger in Vienna and invited him to work for the studio in Los Angeles. Preminger accepted within half an hour of the meeting. His first Fox assignment was directing a vehicle for Lawrence Tibbett, which he completed under budget and ahead of schedule, though it opened to modest notices in November 1936. Zanuck then assigned him the screwball comedy Danger – Love at Work, originally cast with Simone Simon before she was replaced by Ann Sothern. A subsequent assignment, Kidnapped — an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel that Zanuck himself had scripted — ended in a confrontation between the two men over changes allegedly made to a scene involving child actor Freddie Bartholomew, ultimately resulting in Preminger's departure from the studio.

Preminger appeared on Broadway in 1939 in Margin for Error, a credit that reflected his continued engagement with the stage even as his film career developed. His Broadway work was part of a broader theatrical identity he maintained throughout his life, rooted in the training and experience he had accumulated in Vienna and carried with him after emigrating to the United States in the mid-1930s.

His film career recovered and expanded significantly in the 1940s. He gained wide attention for film noir works including Laura in 1944 and Fallen Angel in 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, Preminger directed a series of high-profile adaptations that challenged the censorship standards of the era. The Moon Is Blue in 1953 addressed premarital sexuality, The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955 dealt with drug addiction, Anatomy of a Murder in 1959 centered on rape, and Advise and Consent in 1962 engaged with homosexuality. Over a five-decade career he directed more than 35 feature films and received three Academy Award nominations, twice for Best Director and once for Best Picture. He also appeared as an actor in several roles, most notably as a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp commandant in Stalag 17. His demanding and perfectionist manner on set earned him the nicknames "Otto the Monster" and "Otto the Ogre."