Cecil Blount DeMille (August
12, 1881–January 21, 1959) was a legendary American
film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound
films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship
of his movies. Among some of his most well-known films are
The Ten
Commandments (1956),
Cleopatra (1934), and
The Greatest Show on
Earth (1952), which won the
Academy Award for
Best
Picture.
Early life
DeMille
was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts
while his parents were vacationing there and grew
up in Washington,
North Carolina
. While he is known as DeMille (his nom
d'oeuvre), his family name was Dutch and is usually spelt Demil.
His
father, Henry Churchill DeMille (1853–1893), was a North Carolina
-born dramatist and lay reader in the Episcopal
Church. His mother, Matilda Beatrice (Samuel) DeMille
(1853–1923), was born in England
to a
Sephardic Jewish
family but converted to her husband's faith. DeMille attended
Pennsylvania
Military College
in Chester, Pennsylvania
from the age of 15. He had an elder brother,
William, and a sister Agnes, who
died in childhood. Cecil DeMille's famous
niece was named for her.
After Henry DeMille's
death at age 40, Cecil's mother, Beatrice, ran a well-known
boarding school for girls in Wayne,
New
Jersey
.
Broadway
DeMille began his career as an actor on the Broadway stage in the
theatrical company of
Charles
Frohman in 1900. His brother William was already establishing
himself as a playwright and sometimes worked in collaboration with
Cecil. DeMille co-starred with some of the men and women whom he
would later direct in films (
Charlotte
Walker,
Mary Pickford, and
Pedro de Cordoba, among others).
DeMille also served as producer and/or director for many
plays.
Some of these plays were later adapted into silent and sound films.
Cecil and his brother occasionally worked with
David Belasco. Belasco was legendary for the
way he lit his stage scenes, as well as creating a lurid
atmosphere. In 1911, Belasco premiered a play titled "The Return of
Peter Grimm." DeMille claimed he wrote the play and that Belasco
had
plagiarized DeMille's work without
compensation. DeMille later adopted many of Belasco's stage
lighting and atmospheric techniques in such films as
The Cheat, a move some saw as revenge against
Belasco.
Motion Pictures
Cecil B.
DeMille entered films in 1913. He directed dozens of
silent films, including
Paramount Pictures' first production,
The Squaw Man
(1914), which was co-directed by
Oscar
Apfel, before coming into huge popularity during the late 1910s
and early 1920s, when he reached the apex of his popularity with
such films as
Don't Change
Your Husband (1919),
The Ten Commandments
(1923), and
The King of
Kings (1927). A few of his silent films featured scenes in
two-strip
Technicolor.
Cecil B. DeMille had a keen eye for talent and was known for being
an instrumental catalyst for the rising status of many a struggling
or unknown actor. Actor
Richard Dix's
best-remembered early role was in the silent version of DeMille's
The Ten
Commandments.
Richard
Cromwell owed his 1930s movie fame in part to being personally
selected by DeMille for the role as the leader of the youth gang in
DeMille's poignant, now cult-favorite,
This Day and Age
(1933).
DeMille displayed a loyalty to certain supporting performers,
casting them over and over in his pictures. They included
Henry Wilcoxon,
Julia
Faye,
Joseph Schildkraut,
Ian Keith,
Charles Bickford,
Theodore Roberts,
Akim Tamiroff and
William Boyd. He also cast leading
actors such as
Claudette Colbert,
Gloria Swanson,
Gary Cooper,
Jetta
Goudal,
Robert Preston,
Paulette Goddard and
Charlton Heston in multiple pictures. He was
not known as a particularly good director of actors, often hiring
actors whom he relied on to develop their own characters and act
accordingly.
DeMille also had a reputation for being a tyrant on the set, and he
despised actors who were not willing to take physical risks; such
was the case with
Victor Mature in
Samson and
Delilah, when Mature refused to wrestle the lion, though
the lion was tame and its teeth had been pulled. (DeMille remarked
that Mature was "100% yellow").
Paulette Goddard's refusal to risk personal
injury in a scene involving fire in
Unconquered cost her DeMille's favor and
probably a role in
The
Greatest Show on Earth.
DeMille was, however, adept at directing
"thousands of extras," and many of his pictures included
spectacular set pieces, such as the parting of the Red Sea
in both
versions of The Ten Commandments; the toppling of the
pagan temple in Samson and Delilah;
train wrecks in The Road to
Yesterday, Union
Pacific and The Greatest Show on Earth; and the
destruction of a zeppelin in Madame
Satan. DeMille knew what the movie-going public
wanted, and he provided it.
DeMille was one of the first directors in Hollywood to become a
celebrity in his own right. From 1936 to 1944, DeMille hosted and
even acted as pitchman for Cecil B. DeMille's
Lux Radio Theater, which was one of
the most popular dramatic
radio shows at the
time.
Gloria Swanson immortalized
DeMille with the oft-repeated line, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm
ready for my close-up" in
Billy
Wilder's
Sunset
Boulevard, wherein DeMille played himself. DeMille also
appeared as himself in Paramount's 1947 all-star musical comedy
Variety Girl and he narrated
many of his later films, as well as appearing on screen in the
introduction to
The Ten Commandments.
DeMille first used three-strip
Technicolor in
Northwest Mounted
Police (1940). Following the favorable response to the
vivid color photography, shot partly on location in the
Canadian Rockies, DeMille decided to always
use Technicolor in his films.
While he continued to be prolific throughout the 1930s and 1940s,
he is probably best known for his 1956 film
The Ten Commandments
(which is very different from his 1923 film of the same title).
Also representative of his penchant for the spectacular was the
1952 production of
The
Greatest Show on Earth which gave DeMille an
Oscar for best picture and a nomination for
best director.
In 1949 or 1950, DeMille was recruited by
Allen Dulles and
Frank
Wisner to serve on the board of the
National Committee for a
Free Europe, the public face of the organization that oversaw
the
Radio Free Europe service. In
1954, Secretary of the Air Force
Harold E. Talbott sought out DeMille for help in
designing the cadet uniforms at the newly established
United States Air Force
Academy. DeMille's designs—most notably his design of the
distinctive cadet parade uniform—won praise from Air Force and
Academy leadership, were ultimately adopted, and are still worn by
cadets today.
Near the end of his life, DeMille began pre-production work on a
film biography of
Robert Baden-Powell,
1st Baron Baden-Powell, the founder of the
Scout Movement and had asked
David Niven to star in the film; the film was
never made. Because of illness, he asked his
son-in-law, actor
Anthony Quinn, to direct a remake of his 1938
film
The
Buccaneer; although DeMille served as executive producer,
he was very unhappy with Quinn's work and tried unsuccessfully to
remedy the situation. Despite a good cast led by
Charlton Heston and
Yul Brynner and some impressive battle scenes,
the film was a disappointment.
Personal life
DeMille's tomb at Hollywood Forever
Cemetery
DeMille married
Constance
Adams on August 16, 1902 and had one child, Cecilia. The couple
adopted
Katherine Lester in the
early 1920s; her father had been killed in
World War I and her mother had died of
tuberculosis. Katherine married
Anthony Quinn. They also adopted two sons,
John and
Richard, the latter of
whom became a notable filmmaker, author, and psychologist.
During
on-location filming in Egypt
of the
Exodus sequence for 1956's The Ten Commandments,
the then 73 year-old DeMille climbed a 107-foot ladder to the top
of the massive Per Rameses set and suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Aided by his daughter
Cecilia, but against his doctor's orders, he was back directing the
film within a week.
He died
from heart failure in January 1959 and
was entombed in Hollywood Memorial Cemetery
(now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery
). At the time of his death, he was planning
to direct a movie about space travel.
Legacy honor
The
former film building at Chapman
University in Orange, California
is named in honor of DeMille. The
Lawrence
and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts now resides
in Marion Knotts Studios.
The
Golden Globe Award's annual
Cecil B.
DeMille Award
recognizes lifetime achievement in the film industry.
Middle school named after him Cecil B. DeMille In Long Beach,
Ca.
Filmography (as director)
Filmography (appearing as himself)
See also
References
- Notes
- Robert S. Birchard, "Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood" Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky 2004 ISBN 978-0-8131-2324-0
External links
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