Jules Dassin

Dassin was born in Middletown, Connecticut, one of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a barber. His parents were both Jewish immigrants from Odessa, in modern-day Ukraine.[1] Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. During his youth he attended Camp Kinderland, the left-wing Yiddish youth camp. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

Dassin started as an actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was uncompleted because of Skurnick's early death.

In 1940 he moved to Hollywood and became an assistant director at RKO Pictures before moving to MGM where he made short films including The Tell-Tale Heart (1941) which led to him being promoted to direct feature films.[2]

Dassin quickly became better known for his noir films Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), and Thieves' Highway (1949), which helped him to become regarded as "one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era."[3]

Dassin said Darryl F. Zanuck in 1948 called him into his office to inform him he would be blacklisted, but he still had enough time to make a movie for Fox.[4] Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood during the production of Night and the City (1950).[5] He was not allowed on the studio property to edit or oversee the musical score for the film.[6] He also had trouble finding work abroad, as U.S. distribution companies blacklisted the U.S. distribution of any European film associated with artists blacklisted in Hollywood. In 1952, after Dassin had been out of work for two years, actress Bette Davis hired him to direct her in the Broadway revue Two's Company. The show closed early, however, and Dassin left for Europe.

Dassin did not work as a film director again until Rififi in 1955 (a French production), his most influential film and an early work in the "heist film" genre. He won the Best Director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.

It inspired later heist films, such as Ocean's Eleven (1960).[3] Another film it inspired was Dassin's own heist film Topkapi (1964), filmed in France and Istanbul, Turkey with his future second wife, Melina Mercouri and Oscar winner Peter Ustinov.

Most of Dassin's films in the decades following the blacklist are European productions.[3] His prolific later career in Europe and the affiliation with Greece through his second wife, combined with the Frenchified pronunciation of his surname in Europe (as "Da-SAn" instead of the common American "DASS-ine") led to a common misconception that he was a native European director.[6]

At the Cannes Film Festival in May 1955 he met Melina Mercouri, Greek actress and wife of Panos Harokopos.[3] At about the same time, he discovered the literary works of Nikos Kazantzakis; these two elements created a bond with Greece. Dassin next made He Who Must Die (1957) based on Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified and in which Mercouri appeared. She went on to star in his Never on Sunday (1960) for which she won best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.[7] She then starred in his next three films – Phaedra (1962), Topkapi (1964) and 10:30 P.M. Summer (1966).

He divorced his first wife, Béatrice Launer, in 1962 and married Mercouri in 1966. She later starred in his Promise at Dawn (1970)—during the filming of which, Dassin broke both his legs[8]—and later A Dream of Passion (1978).

Dassin was considered a major Philhellene to the point of Greek officials describing him as a "first generation Greek". Along with Mercouri, he opposed the Greek military junta.

The couple had to leave Greece after the colonels' coup in 1967. In 1970 they were accused of having financed an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship, but the charges were quickly dropped. Dassin and Mercouri lived in New York City during the 1970s; then, when the military dictatorship in Greece fell in 1974, they returned to Greece and lived out their lives there. In 1974 he and Mercouri made The Rehearsal about the junta.

While Mercouri became involved with politics and won a parliamentary seat, Dassin stayed with movie-making in Europe. In 1982 he was a member of the jury at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival.[9]

Dassin died from complications of influenza at the age of 96; he was survived by his two daughters and his grandchildren. Upon his death, the Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis released a statement: "Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and true friend. His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable."[3]

A major supporter of the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens, for which he established the Melina Mercouri Institution in her memory after her death in 1994, he died a few months before the opening ceremony of the New Acropolis Museum.[7]