Joseph Walton Losey III (; January 14, 1909 – June 22, 1984) was an American film and theatre director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.
Among the most critically and commercially successful were the three films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971). His 1976 film Monsieur Klein won the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. Other notable films included The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Eva (1962), King & Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966), Figures in a Landscape (1970), A Doll's House (1973), Galileo (1975), and Don Giovanni (1979). Though drubbed by critics and a box office failure, Boom! (1968) was sometimes cited by Losey as his personal favorite, and Tennessee Willams considered it the best movie adaptation of one of his plays. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both of whom worked with Losey again, Taylor in Secret Ceremony (1968) and Burton in The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).
He was also a four-time nominee for both the (winning once) and the Golden Lion, and a two-time BAFTA Award nominee.
Early life and career
thumb|Losey Memorial Arch (1901) was erected by the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin, in tribute to Losey's grandfather, a prominent attorney and civic leader He attended [[Dartmouth College and Harvard University, beginning as a student of medicine and ending in drama.
Losey became a major figure in New York City political theatre, first directing the controversial failure Little Old Boy in 1933. He declined to direct a staged version of Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, which led Lewis to offer him his first work written for the stage, Jayhawker. Losey directed the show, which had a brief run.
He visited the Soviet Union for several months in 1935, to study the Russian stage. In Moscow he participated in a seminar on film taught by Sergei Eisenstein. He also met Bertolt Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler, who were visiting Moscow at the time.
In 1936, he directed Triple-A Plowed Under on Broadway, a production of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. He then directed the second Living Newspaper presentation, Injunction Granted.
Losey served in the U.S. military during World War II and was discharged in 1945. From 1946 to 1947, Losey worked with Bertolt Brecht—who was living in exile in Los Angeles—and Charles Laughton on the preparations for the staging of Brecht's play Galileo (Life of Galileo) which he and Brecht eventually co-directed with Laughton in the title role, and with music by Eisler. The play premiered on July 30, 1947, at the Coronet Theatre in Beverly Hills. On October 30, 1947, Losey accompanied Brecht to Washington D.C. for Brecht's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Losey had also worked on the Federal Theatre Project, long a target of HUAC. Losey directed the play Triple-A Plowed Under, which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the Dies Committee, as communist propaganda. At some point, probably early in the 1940s, the FBI maintained dossiers on both Losey and Hawes, and that of Losey charged that he was a Stalinist agent as of 1945.
Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work. In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on The Lawless for Paramount Pictures. and left for Europe while his ex-wife Louise departed for Mexico a few days later. HUAC took weeks to try unsuccessfully to serve them with a subpoena compelling their testimony.
Losey settled in Britain and worked as a director of genre films. His first British film The Sleeping Tiger (1954), a noir crime thriller, was made under the pseudonym of Victor Hanbury, because the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted by Hollywood in turn if it became known they had worked with him. It was financed by Nat Cohen at Anglo-Amalgamated who also financed The Intimate Stranger (1956), where Losey carried a pseudonym as well.
His films covered a wide range from the Regency melodrama The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) to the gangster film for Cohen, The Criminal (1960).
Losey was also originally slated to direct the Hammer Films production X the Unknown (1956), but after a few days' work the star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was removed from the project. An alternative version is that Losey was replaced due to illness. Losey was later hired by Hammer Films to direct The Damned, a 1962 British science fiction film based on H.L. Lawrence's novel "The Children of Light".
In the 1960s, Losey began working with playwright Harold Pinter, in what became a long friendship and initiated a successful screenwriting career for Pinter. Losey directed three enduring classics based on Pinter's screenplays: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971).
The Servant won three British Academy Film Awards. Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. The Go-Between won the Golden Palm Award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, four prizes at the 1972 BAFTA awards, and Best British Screenplay at the 1972 Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards. Each of the three films examines the politics of class and sexuality in England at the end of the 19th century (The Go-Between) and in the 1960s. In The Servant, a manservant facilitates the moral and psychological degradation of his privileged and rich employer. Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy and ennui among the educated middle class as two Oxford University tutors competitively objectify a student against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives. In The Go-Between, a young middle-class boy, the summer guest of an upper-class family, becomes the messenger for an affair between a working-class farmer and the daughter of his hosts.
Although Losey's films are generally naturalistic, The Servants hybridisation of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism and expressionism, and both Accidents and The Go-Betweens radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over and musical score, amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective that edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema. All three films are marked by Pinter's sparse, elliptical and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Losey often develops a visual correlate for (and occasionally even works against) by means of dense and cluttered mise-en-scène and peripatetic camera work.
In 1966, Losey directed Modesty Blaise, a comedy spy-fi film produced in the United Kingdom and released worldwide in 1966. Sometimes considered a James Bond parody, it was based loosely on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell.'
Losey directed Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell in the British action film Figures in a Landscape (1970), adapted by Shaw from the novel by Barry England. The film was shot in various locations in Spain.
Losey also worked with Pinter on The Proust Screenplay (1972), an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Losey died before the project's financing could be assembled.
In 1975, Losey realized a long-planned film adaptation of Brecht's Galileo released as Life of Galileo starring Chaim Topol. Galileo was produced as part of the subscription film series of the American Film Theatre, but shot in the UK. In the context of this production, Losey also made a half-hour film based on Galileo's life.
Losey's Monsieur Klein (1976) examined the day in Occupied France when Jews in and around Paris were arrested for deportation. He said he so completely rejected naturalism in film that in this case he divided his shooting schedule into three "visual categories": Unreality, Reality and Abstract.
In 1964, Losey told The New York Times: "I'd love to work in America again, but it would have to be just the right thing." They had a son, Gavrik Losey, in 1938, but divorced in 1944. Gavrik helped with the production on some of his father's films. Gavrik's two sons are film directors Marek Losey and Luke Losey.
Later in 1944, Losey married Louise Stuart; they divorced in 1953. Patricia Losey went on to adapt Lorenzo Da Ponte's opera libretto for Losey's Don Giovanni and Nell Dunn's play for Steaming.
Death
He died from cancer at his home in Chelsea, London, on June 22, 1984, aged 75, four weeks after completing his last film.
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| rowspan="2" |1941
| Youth Gets a Break
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| A Child Went Forth
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| 1945
| A Gun in His Hand
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| 1947
| Leben des Galilei
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| 1955
| A Man on the Beach
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| 1959
| First on the Road
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| Promotional short for the launch of the Ford Anglia 105E
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Theatre credits
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! Year
! Title
!Venue
! Notes
!Ref.
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| 1933
| Little Ol' Boy
|Playhouse Theatre, New York
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| rowspan="5" |1934
|A Bride for the Unicorn
|Brattleboro Theater, Cambridge
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| rowspan="3" |Jayhawker
|National Theatre, Washington, D.C.
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|1954
|The Wooden Dish
|Phoenix Theatre, London
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|1955
|The Night of the Ball
|Noël Coward Theatre, London
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