Lewis Milestone (born
Lev Milstein) (
September 30 1895 -
September 25 1980) was an accomplished, and award-winning
motion picture director. He is known for directing
Two Arabian Knights (1927),
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930),
The General Died at Dawn (1936),
Of Mice and Men (1940),
Ocean's Eleven (1960), and
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
Milestone was born in
Kishinev (
Bessarabia, Imperial Russia, now —
Chişinău, Moldova), although at the time it was the Russian city of
Kishinev, and came to the
United States just prior to
World War I. Milestone held a number of odd jobs before enlisting in the
U.S. Signal Corps, where he worked as an assistant director on Army training films during the war. In
1919 he became a
naturalized citizen of the United States.
After the war he went to
Hollywood, where he first worked as a film cutter, and later as an assistant director.
Howard Hughes promoted Milestone to director, and one of his early efforts, the
1928 film
Two Arabian Knights, won him an
Oscar in the first Academy Award ceremony. He also directed
The Racket, an early
gangster film, and later helped Hughes direct scenes for his aviation saga
Hell's Angels (for which he never received credit).
Milestone won his second
Academy Award for
All Quiet on the Western Front, a harrowing screen adaptation of the antiwar novel by
Erich Maria Remarque. His next,
The Front Page, brought the
Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play to the screen. It earned him another Oscar nomination. His work during the '30's and '40's was always easily identifiable by its lighting and imaginative use of fluid camera. He worked extensively in
television from the mid
1950s.
On his passing in 1980, Lewis Milestone was interred in the
Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in
Los Angeles. 
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