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King Vidor

King Vidor
King Vidor Film Daily 1919.png
1919 magazine ad
Born King Wallis Vidur
(1894-02-08)February 8, 1894
Galveston, Texas, U.S.
Died November 1, 1982(1982-11-01) (aged 88)
Westwood, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Other names King W. Vidor
Occupation Film director, producer, screenwriter
Years active 1913–1980
Spouse(s) Florence Vidor (m. 1915–24)
Eleanor Boardman (m. 1926–31)
Elizabeth Hill (m. 1932–78)
Children Suzanne (1918–2003)
Antonia (1927–2012)
Belinda (born 1930)

King Wallis Vidor (February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982) was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned nearly seven decades. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." He was nominated five times for a Best Director Oscar, and won eight international film awards during his career. Vidor's best known films include The Big Parade (1925), The Crowd (1928), Stella Dallas (1937), and Duel in the Sun (1946). (He is not related to fellow director Charles Vidor)

Vidor (pronounced "vee-dor") was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Based on that experience, he published a fictionalized account of that cyclone, titled "Southern Storm", for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. Erik Larson excerpts a passage from that article in his 2005 book, Isaac's Storm:

His grandfather, Károly (Charles) Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s.

A freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist, Vidor made his debut as a director in 1913 with The Grand Military Parade. In Hollywood from 1915, he worked as a screenwriter and as director of a series of six short juvenile-delinquency films for Judge Willis Brown before directing his first feature, The Turn in the Road, in 1919. A successful mounting of Peg o' My Heart in 1922 won him a long-term contract with Goldwyn Studios (later to be absorbed into MGM). Three years later he made The Big Parade, among the most acclaimed war films of the silent era, and a tremendous commercial success. This success established him as one of MGM's top studio directors for the next decade. In 1928, Vidor received his first Oscar nomination, for The Crowd, widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American silent films. In the same year, he made the classic Show People, a comedy about the film industry starring Marion Davies (in which Vidor had a cameo as himself), and his much-loved screwball comedy The Patsy, which also starred Davies and was his last silent film.


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