Maurice Tourneur

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Maurice Tourneur (February 2, 1876 - August 4, 1961) was a

French film director and screenwriter.

In 1914, with the expansion of the giant French film

companies into the United States market, Tourneur moved to New York City to

direct silent films for Éclair's American branch studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey

before moving to William A. Brady's World Film Corporation, where he directed

important early American feature-length films such as The Wishing Ring, Alias

Jimmy Valentine, The Cub (Martha Hedman's only screen performance) and Trilby,

the last starring Clara Kimball Young and noted stage actor Wilton Lackaye as

Svengali. Before long, Maurice Tourneur was a major and respected force in

American film and a founding member of the East Coast chapter of the Motion

Picture Directors Association. As the feature film evolved in the mid 1910s, he

and his team (comprising screenwriter Charles Maigne, art director Ben Carré,

and cameramen John van den Broek and Lucien Andriot) coupled exceptional

technological skill with unique pictorial and architectural sensibilities in

their productions, giving their films a visual distinctiveness that met with

critical acclaim.

After directing several innovative films for Adolph Zukor's

Artcraft Pictures Corporation (which released through Paramount) in 1917 and

1918, Tourneur launched his own production company with the film Sporting Life.

In 1921 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. By 1922 he

believed that the future of the film industry lay in Hollywood and the

following year he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to go to the West Coast and make

a film version of the Hall Caine novel The Christian. However, Tourneur's

career in the United States faltered in the 1920s as his pictorialism sometimes

hampered the narrative drive of his later films, and he also separated from his

wife Fernande in 1923. He was removed from production on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's

version of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island in 1928, and this marked the end

of his American career.

After his trouble with MGM, Tourneur decided to move back to

his native France. There, he continued to make films both at home and in

Germany, easily making the change to talkies. In 1933 he met his second wife,

actress Louise Lagrange (1898-1979), while shooting his film, L'Homme

mystérieux. Tourneur went on to direct another two dozen films, several of

which were crime thrillers, until a 1949 automobile accident in which he was seriously

injured and lost a leg. Health and age prevented him from directing more films,

but a voracious reader and a skilled hobby artist, he kept busy painting and

translating detective novels from English into French.

On his passing in 1961, Maurice Tourneur was interred in the

Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Maurice Tourneur was honoured with a star on the Hollywood

Walk of Fame at 6243 Hollywood Blvd.

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