Biography for
Josef von Sternberg More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

29 May 1894, Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Date of Death

22 December 1969, Hollywood, California, USA (heart attack)

Birth Name

Jonas Sternberg

Height

5' 5" (1.65 m)

Mini Biography

Josef von Sternberg split his childhood between Vienna and New York City. His father, an ex-soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, could not support his family in either city; Sternberg remembered him only as "an enormously strong man who often used his strength on me." Forced by poverty to drop out of high school, von Sternberg worked for a time in a Manhattan store that sold ribbons and lace to hatmakers. A chance meeting in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, led to a new career in the cleaning and repair of movie prints. This job provided an entrée to the film production industry, then flourishing in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As an apprentice filmmaker, from around 1916 to the early 1920s, von Sternberg developed a lasting contempt for most of the directors and producers he worked for (an exception was Emile Chautard, who acted in some of Sternberg's films of the 1930s), and was sure that he could improve on their products. Staked to a few thousand dollars -- even then an absurdly small budget -- von Sternberg proved himself right with The Salvation Hunters (1925), which became a critical and financial hit. For the next couple of years he seesawed between acclaim and oblivion, sometimes on the same project (for instance, he received the rare honor of directing a film for Charles Chaplin, but it was shelved after only one showing and later disappeared forever). His commercial breakthrough was Underworld (1927), a prototypical Hollywood gangster film; behind the scenes, von Sternberg successfully battled Ben Hecht, the writer, for creative control. With The Last Command (1928), starring the equally strong-willed Emil Jannings, von Sternberg began a period of almost a decade as one of the most celebrated artists of world cinema. Both his film career and his personal life were transformed in the making of Der blaue Engel (1930). Chosen by Jannings and producer Erich Pommer to make Germany's first major sound picture, von Sternberg gambled by casting Marlene Dietrich, then obscure, as Lola Lola, the nightclub dancer who leads Jannings' character into depravity. The von Sternberg-Dietrich story, both on-screen (he directed her in six more movies) and off (he became one of her legions of lovers, more in love with her than most) is a staple of film histories. His films of the mid-'30s are among the most visionary ever made in Hollywood, but in spite of their visual sumptuousness, contemporary audiences found them dramatically inert. The films' mediocre box office and a falling-out with Ernst Lubitsch, then head of production at Paramount Pictures (Sternberg's employer), meant that after The Devil Is a Woman (1935) he would never again have the control he needed to express himself fully. In his sardonic autobiography, he more or less completely disowned all of his subsequent films. In spite (or perhaps because) of his truncated career and bitter personality, von Sternberg remains a hero to many critics and filmmakers. His best films exemplify the proposition, as he put it, that in any worthwhile film the director is "the determining influence, and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen."

IMDb Mini Biography By: David S. Smith

Spouse

Meri Otis Wilner	(October 1948 - 22 December 1969) (his death) 1 child
Jean Avette McBride	(1945 - 1947) (divorced)
Riza Royce	(1926 - 1930) (divorced)

Trivia

Father of Nicholas Josef von Sternberg

He maintained such a tyrannical, imperious personality when shooting films that Robert Mitchum threatened to throw him off a pier when they were shooting Macao (1952).

He had an intense creative and sexual relationship with Marlene Dietrich.

Was voted the 37th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1041-1051. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Is portrayed by Hans Werner Meyer in Marlene (2000)

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Directed 3 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Emil Jannings, George Bancroft and Marlene Dietrich. Jannings won for his performance in The Last Command (1928).

Personal Quotes

"Nothing has ever been invented that is more cumbersome to make than the motion picture."

'Shadow is mystery and light is clarity. Shadow conceals - light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal and in what degrees to do this is all there is to art.'

[on the director's role] ". . . the determining influence, and the only influence, despotically exercised or not, which accounts for the worth of what is seen on the screen."

The finished product is not finished when the actor is. The work is completed by a pair of shears.

The only way to succeed is to make people hate you. That way they remember you.

I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented.

[on Gary Cooper] One of the nicest human beings I have ever met.

[on Charles Laughton] I had great difficulty managing Laughton; so did Alexander Korda.

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