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Nicholas Ray

Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray.jpg
Born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr.
(1911-08-07)August 7, 1911
Galesville, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died June 16, 1979(1979-06-16) (aged 67)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation Film director
Years active 1948–1979
Spouse(s) Jean (Abrams) Evans (1936–1942; divorced; 1 child)
Gloria Grahame (1948–1952; divorced; 1 child)
Betty Utey (1958–1964; divorced; 2 children)
Susan Schwartz (1969–1979; his death)

Nicholas Ray (August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause.

Ray is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer. Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. Ray was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of Bitter Victory, "cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr. in Galesville, Wisconsin, the son of Olene "Lena" (Toppen) and Raymond Joseph Kienzle, a contractor and builder. His paternal grandparents were German and his maternal grandparents were Norwegian. He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. A popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse, Ray spent much of his adolescence with his older sister in Chicago, Illinois, where he immersed himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife and attended Waller High School. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year of high school, he emerged as a talented orator (winning a contest at local radio station WKBH that included a modest scholarship to "any university in the world") and gravitated toward hanging around a local stock theater. With strong grades in English & public speaking and failures in Latin, physics, and geometry, he graduated at the bottom (ranked 152nd in a class of 153) of his class at La Crosse Central High School in 1929. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) for two years before earning the requisite grades to matriculate at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he only spent one semester at the institution due to excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate relationships with Frank Lloyd Wright and dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor. Ray received a Taliesin Fellowship from Wright to study under him as an apprentice.


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