Nicholas Ray born 7 August 1911 (d. 1979)Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) was an American film director.
Coming from a radio background, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live By Night. It was released two years later due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic, tender take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). It was influential in the sporadically popular sub-genre often called 'love on the run' movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 70’s remake of They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us.)
Ray made several more contributions to the film noir genre, most notably the Humphrey Bogart movie In A Lonely Place about a troubled screenwriter, and On Dangerous Ground, a powerful police thriller. The former is noted for featuring one of Bogart’s most complex performances.
Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s, although his sympathy for society's outsiders and rebels clearly pre-dated the 1960s counter-culture. It was in the mid-50s that he made the two films for which he is best remembered. Johnny Guitar (1954) was an influential, proto-feminist western much loved by French critics (François Truffaut called it 'the beauty and the beast' of the western).In 1955, however, Ray directed the iconic Rebel Without a Cause. Its legendary status had much to do with its star James Dean, whose premature death followed soon after the film’s completion. Looking past its main attraction these days as a vehicle for the poster boy of a generation, Rebel Without a Cause distilled much of the essence of Ray’s cinematic vision: expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture and an empathy for those who struggle to fit in to mainstream society.
Ray also made many other films in multiple genres which, although made with professionalism and flair, were comparatively minor works, often suffering from unwanted studio interference.
A bisexual and heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he would not direct again until the mid-1970s.
From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught film making at Harpur College (part of the State University of New York) where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an ambitious autobiographical film employing split-screen images. An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. He died of lung cancer on June 16, 1979 at the age of 67 in New York City, New York.
Nicholas Ray’s immense influence on a younger generation of directors cannot be overstated. Certain French New Wave directors and critics (most notably Jean-Luc Godard) held Ray in high regard. Wim Wenders' films are indebted to Ray, from the casting of Rebel Without a Cause's Dennis Hopper and the expressionistic use of colour in his own film The American Friend, to the title of sci-fi film Until the End of the World (which were the last spoken words in Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings).