Born in
Goshen, Indiana, Howard was the first-born child of Frank W. Hawks and the former Helen Howard. After the birth of Howard's first brother, Kenneth Neil Hawks, on August 12, 1899, the family moved to Neenah, Wisconsin. Shortly afterwards they moved again, to Southern California.
Hawks attended high school in Glendora, and then moved to New Hampshire to attend
Phillips Exeter Academy from 1912-1914. After graduation, Hawks moved on to
Cornell University in
Ithaca, NY, where he majored in mechanical engineering. During the summers of 1916 and 1917, Howard worked on some early movies, interning for the Famous Players-Lasky Studio. After graduation he joined the
United States Army Air Service during
World War I.
After the war, he worked at a number of jobs: race-car driver, aviator, designer in an aircraft factory. By 1924 he had moved back to Hollywood and joined the movie industry. He chummed with the barn stormers and pioneer aviators at Rogers Airport in Los Angeles, getting to know men like
Moye Stephens. Hawks wrote his first screenplay,
Tiger Love, in 1924 and he directed his first film,
The Road to Glory, in 1925. Hawks reworked the scripts of most of the films he directed but without taking official credit for his writing.
Howard Hawks directed a total of eight silent films, including
Fazil in 1928. Unlike some of his fellow silent-film directors, he was able to make the transition to sound without difficulty, and his most important films were all done with the spoken word. A partial list includes:
*
Scarface (1932) - Rated "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress.
*
Bringing up Baby (1938) - Starring
Katharine Hepburn and
Cary Grant. Listed number ninety-seven on American Film Institute's
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies.
*
Only Angels Have Wings (1939) - Starring Cary Grant and
Jean Arthur. Remade again in 1942 (
Flying Tigers) and again (loosely) in 1983 as a TV series (
Tales of the Gold Monkey).
*
His Girl Friday (1940) - Starring Cary Grant and
Rosalind Russell. Listed #19 on American Film Institute's
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs.
*
Sergeant York (1941) - Starring
Gary Cooper. It was the highest-grossing film of its year and won two
Academy Awards (
Best Actor and
Best Editing).
*
To Have and Have Not (1944) - First film pairing of
Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall.
*
The Big Sleep (1946) - Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The
Library of Congress placed it on the U.S.
National Film Registry.
*
Red River (1948) - Starring
John Wayne and
Montgomery Clift. Rated "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress.
*
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) - Starring
Marilyn Monroe, who sings "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", one of the most famous production numbers in Hollywood history.
*
Land of the Pharaohs (1955) - Starring
Joan Collins. One of Hollywood's largest scale, ancient world epics.
*
Rio Bravo (1959) - Starring John Wayne,
Dean Martin and
Walter Brennan. Remade twice by Hawks in 1967 (
El Dorado) and again in 1970 (
Rio Lobo), both also starring John Wayne.
Hawks was known for his versatility as a director, filming comedies, dramas, gangster films, science fiction, film noir, and Westerns with equal ease and skill. Hawks' own functional definition of what constitutes a "good movie" is revealing of his no-nonsense style: "Three great scenes, no bad ones."
Hawks was in many ways ahead of his time. While not politically
feminist or sympathetic to their goals, he popularized the
Hawksian woman archetype, which could be considered a
prototype of the modern
post-feminist movement. At the same time, Hawks was known to make anti-semitic comments, including in front of Jewish actress Lauren Bacall, who kept her Jewish identity a secret from Hawks and who did not call him on his hateful comments, both of which she has said she regrets now.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050725&s=siegel072705
Critic
Leonard Maltin has labeled Hawks "the greatest American director who is not a household name," noting that, while his work may not be as well known as
Ford, Welles, or
Hitchcock, he is no less a talented filmmaker.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Howard Hawks has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1708 Vine Street.
Hawks once defined a good director as "someone who doesn't annoy you". His unpretentious and straightforward directorial style and the use of natural, conversational dialogue in his films have subsequently been a major influence on many noted filmmakers, including
Robert Altman, John Carpenter, and
Quentin Tarantino. He was nominated for
Best Director in 1942 for
Sergeant York, but he received his only Oscar in 1975 as an
Honorary Award from the Academy.
Although originally dismissed by the more intellectual critics in the English-speaking world (especially in the
United Kingdom, where his work was virtually ignored by
Sight and Sound), Hawks was idolised and taken very seriously indeed by the
French critics associated with
Cahiers du Cinéma in the
1950s, and this spread to the
United Kingdom where Hawks became an icon for
Ian Cameron, Robin Wood and the other critics associated with
Movie magazine.
Hawks was married three times, to
Athole Shearer (a sister of movie actress
Norma Shearer), Nancy Gross (later and better known as
Slim Keith, she was the mother of his daughter,
Kitty Hawks, a noted interior designer), and
Dee Hartford (an actress whose real name was Donna Higgins). His brothers were director/writer Kenneth Neil Hawks and film producer William Bettingger Hawks.
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