Jules Dassin
| Jules Dassin | |
|---|---|
Jules Dassin (right) with son Joe in Paris in 1970
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| Born |
Julius Dassin December 18, 1911 Middletown, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | March 31, 2008 (aged 96) Athens, Greece |
| Spouse(s) | Béatrice Launer (1937–1962; divorced) Melina Mercouri (1966–1994; her death) |
| Children |
Joseph Ira Dassin Richelle Dassin Julie Dassin |
Julius "Jules" Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008) was an American film director, producer, writer and actor. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France, where he revived his career.
Dassin was born in Middletown, Connecticut, one of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a barber. His family was of Ukrainian and Polish-Jewish extraction. Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death.
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 "one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era."
Dassin's most influential film was Rififi (1955), an early work in the "heist film" genre. It inspired later heist films, such as Ocean's Eleven (1960). Another piece it inspired was Dassin's own heist film Topkapi, filmed in France and Istanbul, Turkey with Melina Mercouri and Oscar winner Peter Ustinov.
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