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Samuel Bronston
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Samuel Bronston (26 March 1908 - 12 January 1994) was a Romanian-born American film producer.
Bronston was born in Bessarabia, Romania (present day Moldova) and educated at the Sorbonne. He worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's French unit in Paris before setting up as an independent film producer by the 1940s. His first film for his new production company, Samuel Bronston Productions, was Jack London, (1943) followed by a series of epic films: John Paul Jones (1959), King of Kings (1961), El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
He was a pioneer in the practice of locating epic-scale productions in Spain to reduce the massive costs involved. The success of his films inspired him to help build gigantic studios in Las Rozas near Madrid.
Bronston frequently worked with a regular team of creative artists: the director Anthony Mann, the screenwriters Philip Yordan and Jesse Lasky Jr., the composer Miklós Rózsa, the co-producers Jaime Prades, Alan Brown and Michal Waszynski, the cinematographer Robert Krasker and film editor Robert Lawrence. He also favoured Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren as his leading actors.
The cost of the construction of the film studios and the box-office failure of his last epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire combined to leave Bronston in financial difficulties and, in 1964, he had to stop all business activities. He completed the 1964 Circus World with John Wayne under the production company "Bronson", after which he made only three films, Savage Pampas (1966), filmed in Argentina with Robert Taylor, Doctor Coppelius (1966) and Fort Saganne (1984), a French film with Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. A planned epic on the life of Isabella of Spain never materialised.
In 1962, Bronston was awarded a Special Merit Golden Globe Award for El Cid.
Bronston died in Sacramento, California and is buried in Alicante, Spain.
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