Marty director Delbert Mann dies
Delbert Mann, who won a directing Oscar for the 1955 film Marty and helmed many notable television dramas, has died at the age of 87.
Mann died of pneumonia Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his son Fred Mann said Monday.
Mann's version of the Paddy Chayefsky play captured four Oscars in 1956, including best picture.
The director, born in Lawrence, Kan., in 1920, studied political science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.He became involved in a community theatre troupe during that time and went on to get an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama.
In 1949, he began directing dramas on NBC's Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse and during the 1950s he would also direct other TV productions for Omnibus, Playwrights '56, Ford Star Jubilee, and Ford Startime.
Mann went on to direct Chayefsky's Marty for Philco-Goodyear to much acclaim and two years later, he turned it into a film.It captured the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival before garnering four Academy Awards, for best director, picture, actor (Ernest Borgnine) and adapted screenplay.
Marty told thepoignant story of a Brooklyn butcher who felt he was too ugly to find love. His life is changed when he meets an equally shy but sweet womanplayed by Betsy Blair.
"I knew we had a good story because I had already done it on television," Mann once said in an interview. "But I certainly never expected it to be the hit that it turned out to be."
Using little-known actors and television techniques for production, Mann shot the film in19 days.
Mann was a busy director, going on to do a TV version of another Chayefsky play, The Bachelor Party.
He turned to film for a while during the 1960s including The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), The Outsider (1960), Lover,Come Back (1961), That Touch of Mink (1962), Dear Heart (1963), Quick Before It Melts (1964) and Fitzwilly (1967).
Mann explained his directing method in a 1993 interview: "The good director … must make everything the actor does stay within the framework of reality and truth for the characters in the script and their particular situation.… Every move and position must be motivated truly."
Mann never left television. He directed many great actors in TV movies such as David Copperfield starring Laurence Olivier, Jane Eyre with Susannah York, The Man Without a Country with Cliff Robertson, The Last Days of Patton with George C. Scott and April Morning starring Tommy Lee Jones.
"He has a clear and open mind that leads him and his actors to the kind of preparations that will cause a story to propel itself rather than being laboriously pushed or pulled," Jones once said of Mann.
Mann was nominated for three Emmy awards for directing: Our Town (1955), Breaking Up (1977), and All Quiet on the Western Front (1979).
The Our Town production was a musical adaptation of the play featuring the young Paul Newman and the singing talents of Frank Sinatra.