Emeric Pressburger

Emeric Pressburger (born Imre József Pressburger; 5 December 1902 – 5 February 1988) was a Hungarian-British screenwriter, film director, and producer. He is best known for his series of film collaborations with Michael Powell, in a collaboration partnership known as the Archers, and produced a series of films, including 49th Parallel (US: The Invaders, 1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (US: Stairway to Heaven, 1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

Imre József Pressburger was born in Miskolc, in the Kingdom of Hungary, of Jewish heritage. He was the only son (he had one elder half-sister from his father's previous marriage) of Kálmán Pressburger, estate manager, and his second wife, Kätherina (née Wichs). He attended a boarding-school in Temesvár (today better known as Timișoara), where he was a good pupil, excelling at mathematics, literature and music. He then studied mathematics and engineering at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart before his father's death forced him to abandon his studies.

Pressburger began a career as a journalist. After working in Hungary and Weimar Republic-era Germany he turned to screenwriting in the late 1920s, working for UFA in Berlin (having moved there in 1926). The rise of the Nazis forced him to flee to Paris, where he again worked as screenwriter, and then to London. He later said, "[the] worst things that happened to me were the political consequences of events beyond my control ... the best things were exactly the same."

Pressburger's early films were mainly made in Germany and France where he worked at the UFA Studios in the Dramaturgie department (script selection, approval and editing) and as a scriptwriter in his own right. In the 1930s, many European films were produced in multiple-language versions. Some of the films made in Germany survive with French intertitles and vice versa.

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, UFA's head sacked the company's remaining Jewish employees with Pressburger being told his contract would not be renewed. He left his Berlin apartment, "leaving the key in the door so that the Stormtroopers wouldn't have to break the door down" and left for Paris. Late in 1935, Pressburger decided that he would do better in England.

Pressburger arrived in Britain in 1935 as a stateless person; once he decided to settle, he changed his name to Emeric in 1938. In England, he found a small community of Hungarian film-makers who had fled the Nazis, including Alexander Korda, owner of London Films, who employed him as a screenwriter. Asked by Korda to improve the script for The Spy in Black (1939), he met the film's director, Michael Powell. Their partnership would produce some of the most acclaimed British films of the next decade. However, Pressburger still did some projects on his own.

Pressburger was much more than "Michael Powell's screenwriter" as some have categorised him. The films they made together in this period were mainly original stories by Pressburger, who also did most of the work of a producer for the team. Pressburger was also more involved in the editing process than Powell, and as a musician, Pressburger was also involved in the choice of music for their films.

Powell and Pressburger began to go their separate ways after the mid-1950s. They remained close friends but wanted to explore different things, having done about as much as they could together. Their last film as a partnership was Ill Met By Moonlight but Pressburger's first film as a solo producer, Miracle in Soho, flopped.