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Irving Rapper

Known For
Directing

Known Credits
1

Gender
Male

Birthday
January 16, 1898 (128 years old)

Place of Birth
London, England, UK

Irving Rapper

Biography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irving Rapper (16 January 1898, or 1902 – 20 December 1999) was an England-born American film director.

Born to a Jewish family in London, England, Rapper emigrated to the United States and became an actor and stage director on Broadway while studying at New York University. In 1936, he went to Hollywood, where he was hired by Warner Bros. as an assistant director and dialogue coach. He proved invaluable in translating and mediating for non-native English-speaking directors. By the early 1940s, he had metamorphosed into one of the hottest directors on the Warner Bros. lot.

He made his directing debut with the 1941 film Shining Victory, in which his friend Bette Davis appeared as a show of support for him. He would go on to direct her in four more films, Now, Voyager (1942), The Corn Is Green (1945), Deception (1946), and Another Man's Poison (1952). In later years, Rapper admitted that he found Davis very difficult to work with and that she would, "...hold the whole set hostage, stopping production for a day, because of her mood."

Rapper's film One Foot in Heaven (1941) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film. Perhaps his best film in a studio other than Warner Bros. was The Brave One (1956) about a Mexican boy who must rescue his bull from a brutal fight against a top matador, which earned the then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo an Academy Award for his original screenplay despite being a box office failure.

Additional credits include The Voice of the Turtle (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1950), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), and The Miracle, a 1959 remake of the 1912 hand-colored, black-and-white film The Miracle.

Biopics directed by Rapper include The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944), Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Pontius Pilate (co-director, 1962) and his last film, Born Again (1978), about convicted Watergate conspirator and former Richard Nixon aide Charles Colson.

Rapper died at the age of 101 on 20 December 1999 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where he had been a resident since 1995.

Known For

Directing

1978Born Again...Director
1970The Christine Jorgensen Story...Director
1962Pontius Pilate...Director
1961Joseph and His Brethren...Director
1959The Miracle...Director
1958Marjorie Morningstar...Director
1956The Brave One...Director
1956Strange Intruder...Director
1953Bad for Each Other...Director
1953Forever Female...Director
1951Another Man's Poison...Director
1950The Glass Menagerie...Director
1949Anna Lucasta...Director
1947The Voice of the Turtle...Director
1946Deception...Director
1945Rhapsody in Blue...Director
1945The Corn Is Green...Director
1944The Adventures of Mark Twain...Director
1942Now, Voyager...Director
1942The Gay Sisters...Director
1941One Foot in Heaven...Director
1941Shining Victory...Director
1940All This, and Heaven Too...Assistant Director
1940Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet...Assistant Director
1939Dust Be My Destiny...Script Supervisor
1938The Sisters...Assistant Director
1937Kid Galahad...Assistant Director
1936The Story of Louis Pasteur...Assistant Director
1929The Hole in the Wall...Assistant Director

Production

1941One Foot in Heaven...Producer

Crew

1939Invisible Stripes...Dialogue Coach
1939Juarez...Dialogue Coach
1937The Life of Emile Zola...Dialogue Coach
1937Kid Galahad...Dialogue Coach
1937The Go-Getter...Dialogue Coach

Writing

1939Off the Record...Dialogue
1936Stage Struck...Dialogue

Acting

2026Now, Irving Rapperas Self