Comfortable in a variety of genres and able to elicit career performances from actors and actresses alike, Mankiewicz combined ironic, sophisticated scripts with a precise, sometimes stylized mise en scène.
Mankiewicz worked for seventeen years as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and as a writer and producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before getting a chance to direct at 20th Century Fox. Over six years, he made 11 films for Fox.
Mankiewicz was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Franz Mankiewicz (died 1941) and Johanna Blumenau, Jewish emigrants from Germany and Courland, respectively.[1][2][3][4][5] Besides his older sister, Erna Mankiewicz Stenbuck (1901–1979), he had an older brother, Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897–1953), who brought him to Hollywood to become a screenwriter.[1][6][7] Herman also won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane (1941).[8]
At age four, Mankiewicz moved with his family to New York City, graduating in 1924 from Stuyvesant High School.[9] He followed his brother to Columbia University, where he majored in English and wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator, and after he graduated in 1928,[10] he moved to Berlin, where he worked at several jobs, including translating film intertitles from German to English for UFA.[1][2]
Mankiewicz was promoted to producer with Three Godfathers (1936). On most of his films as producer he would work uncredited on the script. Mankiewicz had a commercial and critical success with Fury (1936), the first American film directed by Fritz Lang. Mankiewicz produced a series of films starring Crawford: The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), Love on the Run (1936), The Bride Wore Red (1937), and Mannequin (1937).
Mankiewicz received an offer at 20th Century Fox that included the right to direct. His first film for the studio was The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), which he wrote with Nunnally Johnson and produced. It co-starred his wife Rose Stradner.
Mankiewicz had a huge success with A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which he wrote and directed, winning Oscars for both; Sol Siegel produced. He and Siegel collaborated again on House of Strangers (1949), on which Mankiewicz did some uncredited writing. Mankewicz wrote and directed No Way Out (1950), which launched the career of Sidney Poitier; Darryl F. Zanuck was credited as producer. Zanuck also took that credit on Mankiewicz's next film, All About Eve (1950), which quickly became regarded as a classic.
Mankewicz adapted and directed People Will Talk (1951), also produced by Zanuck, which starred Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain. He did some uncredited work on the script for I'll Never Forget You (1952). His last film under contract with Fox was 5 Fingers (1952), starring James Mason and Danielle Darrieux.
Independent
In 1951 Mankiewicz left Fox and moved to New York, intending to write for the Broadway stage. Although this dream never materialized, he continued to make films (both for his own production company Figaro and as a director-for-hire) that explored his favorite themes – the clash of aristocrat with commoner, life as performance and the clash between people's urge to control their fate and the contingencies of real life.[citation needed]
In 1953 he adapted and directed Julius Caesar for MGM, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play produced by John Houseman. It received widely favorable reviews, and David Shipman, in The Story of Cinema, described it as a "film of quiet excellence, faltering only in the later moments when budget restrictions hampered the handling of the battle sequences".[11] The film serves as the only record of Marlon Brando in a Shakespearean role; he played Mark Antony and received an Oscar nomination for his performance.
Figaro
In 1953, Mankiewicz set up his own production company, Figaro. Its first production was The Barefoot Contessa (1954) which Mankiewicz wrote, produced and directed; it starred Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Sam Goldwyn hired him to write and direct the film version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955). This was a huge hit but not highly regarded critically. Brando starred along with Frank Sinatra and Jean Simmons.
In 1958 Mankiewicz wrote and directed The Quiet American for Figaro, an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel about American military involvement in what would become the Vietnam War. Mankiewicz, influenced by the climate of anti-Communism and the Hollywood blacklist, switched the message of Greene's book, changing major parts of the story. A cautionary tale about America's blind support for "anti-Communists" was turned into, according to Greene, a "propaganda film for America".[12]
In 1961, 20th Century Fox was producing Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor and hired Mankiewicz to replace director Rouben Mamoulian.[1] Mankiewicz accepted a lucrative contract, which he came to regret. The film consumed two years of his life and ended up both derailing his career and adding to severe financial losses for the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox.
Later career
Mankiewicz produced and directed Carol for Another Christmas (1964) for television. He wrote and directed The Honey Pot (1967) for United Artists and Charles K. Feldman, and produced and directed There Was a Crooked Man... (1970), as well as doing some uncredited work on the documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Mankiewicz garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Direction in 1972 for Sleuth, his final directing effort, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, who also received Oscar nominations. He worked for a number of years on a screenplay adaptation of the novel Jane (as written by Dee Wells) before being removed from consideration after completing over half of the script. One description of his later years had him partaking in "writing in notebooks, transcribing facts, opinions and "tribal customs and taboos."[13]
Mankiewicz was the younger brother of legendary Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-writer (with Orson Welles) of Citizen Kane among numerous other films. In 2024, Joseph and Herman were both announced as inductees into the Luzerne County Arts & Entertainment Hall of Fame.[15]
His sons are Eric Reynal (from his first marriage, to actress Elizabeth Young),[16] producer Christopher Mankiewicz, and writer/director Tom Mankiewicz. He also has a daughter, Alex Mankiewicz.
He was the uncle of Frank Mankiewicz, a well-known political campaign manager who officially announced the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and Johanna Mankiewicz Davis, a writer who was struck and killed by a taxicab in New York City at the age of 36.[17]
Mankiewicz died of a heart attack on February 5, 1993, six days before his 84th birthday. He was interred in Saint Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard cemetery in Bedford, New York.[9]
^ abcdefStern, Sydney Ladensohn (2019). The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN9781617032677.
^The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1998. ISBN0-684-80620-7. Mankiewicz was the youngest of three children born to the German immigrants Franz Mankiewicz, a secondary schoolteacher, and Johanna Blumenau, a homemaker.
^Dick, Bernard F. (1983). Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Twayne Publishers. ISBN0-8057-9291-0. The father, Franz Mankiewicz, emigrated from Germany in 1892, living first in New York and then moving to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in to take a job ...
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