Irving Rapper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irving Rapper (6 January 1898 - 20 December 1999) was a film director in the United Kingdom.

Born in London on January 16, 1898, he emigrated to the United States and became an actor and stage director on Broadway while studying at New York University. In the mid-1930s he journeyed westward to Hollywood, hired by Warner Bros. as an assistant director and dialog coach at Warner Bros., where he proved invaluable translating, and mediating for, non-native English-speaking directors, By the early 1940s he had metamorphosed into the one of the hottest directors on the Warner Bros. lot, along with Michael Curtiz.

Known as a director of romantic melodramas referred to as "women's pictures", Rapper worked with such performers as Fredric March, Kirk Douglas, Eve Arden, Claude Rains, and Ronald Reagan. He directed Bette Davis in The Corn is Green (1945), Deception (1946), and Another Man's Poison (1952).

Overall, the London-born filmmaker's most successful body of work is comprised of the ten films Rapper made while under contract with Warner Bros., where he started out in 1936 as a dialogue coach. He made his directing debut with the 1941 film Shining Victory, and gained popular and critical success with his next film the same year, One Foot in Heaven which earned an Oscar nomination for best film. The 1945 biographical film Rhapsody in Blue is widely regarded as having suffered from the casting of Robert Alda, father of M.A.S.H. star Alan Alda, as composer George Gershwin.

Perhaps his best film in another studio other than Warner Bros. was The Brave One (1956), which earned then blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo an Academy Award for his original screenplay about a Mexican boy and a bull. The Oscar was awarded under Trumbo's pseudonym, Robert Rich.

Near the end of his directorial career he made two more films for Warner Bros. They were the 1958 Marjorie Morningstar (film), based on Herman Wouk's novel, and The Miracle, a 1959 remake of the 1912 Austrian film Das Mirakel. Both versions of The Miracle were based on the famous stage pantomime by Karl Vollmöller and Max Reinhardt.

Other biopics directed by Rapper included The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Pontius Pilate (1962) and his very last film, the 1978 flop Born Again, about convicted Watergate conspirator and former Nixon aide Charles Colson.

He died on December 20, 1999 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in suburban Los Angeles, where he had been a resident since 1995, at the age of 101.

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