Joseph L. Mankiewicz

To date the only filmmaker to have won Oscars for writing and directing two years in a row. (2011).

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1983

Was awarded the Italian Order of Merit in 1965, in gratitude for his having made four movies in Italy. He was the first American to receive the honor.

Obliged as a disciplinary measure to write some episodes of the TV series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954), he wrote a script in which the dog behaved like a perfect coward and, instead of saving a boy from a fire, made him fall down into the flames.

He directed two films which featured Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony as major characters: Julius Caesar (1953) and Cleopatra (1963).

Though often thought of as a "theatrical" director, Mankiewicz only directed one live stage production in his life, Puccini's opera "La bohème" for the Metropolitan Opera which opened in 1952. It remained in the Met's repertoire through 1976 and was performed over 300 times in the "old Met" at 39th Street and Broadway (torn down in 1966) and the "new house" at Lincoln Center. All of the "Three Tenors" - Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and José Carreras - appeared as Rodolfo in the production.

(1950-1951) President of the Screen Directors Guild.

A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950) brought him wide recognition along with two Academy Awards for each as a writer and a director, seven years after his elder brother Herman J.

Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, producing The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), when Ernst Lubitsch's illness first brought him to the director's chair for Dragonwyck (1946). Mankiewicz directed 20 films in a 26-year period, successfully attempted every kind of movie from Shakespeare adaptation to western, from urban sociological drama to musical, from epic film with thousands of extras to a two-character picture.

Mankiewicz won Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941). His more intimate films like The Ghost and Mrs.

Still in his 20s, he produced first-class MGM films, including The Philadelphia Story (1940). Having left Metro after a dispute with studio chief Louis B. Mayer over Judy Garland, he then worked for Darryl F.

As an MGM producer in 1938, rewrote F. Scott Fitzgerald's screenplay of the Erich Maria Remarque novel "Three Comrades." Fitzgerald from then on would refer to him as "Monkeybitch." Fitzgerald nevertheless received his only screen credit for the adaptation.

He has produced three films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Fury (1936), The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Woman of the Year (1942). He has also directed two films that are in the registry: All About Eve (1950) and King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970).

Wrote the screenplay for six Oscar Best Picture nominees: Skippy (1931), Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) (uncredited), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950), Julius Caesar (1953) and Cleopatra (1963). He also directed the last four of these. He won Best Screenplay and Best Director in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). All About Eve also won for Best Picture.

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on February 11, 1909, Joseph Leo Mankiewicz first worked for the movies as a translator of intertitles, employed by Paramount in Berlin, the UFA's American distributor at the time (1928). He became a dialoguist, then a screenwriter on numerous Paramount productions in Hollywood, most of them Jack Oakie vehicles.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 714-722. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987. Biography in: Cheryl Bray Lower & R. Barton Palmer, "Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Studies and Guide to Resources with Annotated Bibliography and Filmography." Pages 5-23. Jefferson NY: McFarland & Co., 2001.