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Robert Rossen

Robert Rossen (March 16, 1908 – February 18, 1966) was an American screenwriter, film director, and producer whose film career spanned almost three decades.

His 1949 film All the King's Men won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, while Rossen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. He won the Golden Globe for Best Director and the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture. In 1961, he directed The Hustler, which was nominated for nine Oscars and won two.

After directing and writing for the stage in New York, Rossen moved to Hollywood in 1937. From there, he worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. until 1941, and then interrupted his career to serve until 1944 as the chairman of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a body to organize writers for the effort in World War II. In 1945, he joined a picket line against Warner Bros. After making one film for Hal B. Wallis's newly formed production company, Rossen made one for Columbia Pictures, another for Wallis and most of his later films for his own companies, usually in collaboration with Columbia.

Rossen was a member of the American Communist Party from 1937 to about 1947, and believed the Party was "dedicated to social causes of the sort that we as poor Jews from New York were interested in."

He ended all relations with the Party in 1949. Rossen was twice called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), in 1951 and in 1953. He exercised his Fifth Amendment rights at his first appearance, refusing to state whether he had ever been a Communist. As a result, he found himself blacklisted by Hollywood studios as well as unable to renew his passport. At his second appearance he named 57 people as current or former Communists and his blacklisting ended. In order to repair finances he produced his next film, Mambo, in Italy in 1954. While The Hustler in 1961 was a great success, conflicts on the set of Lilith in 1964 so disillusioned him that it was his last film before his death two years later.[citation needed]

Robert Rosen was born on March 16, 1908,[citation needed] and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father, Philip Rosen, was a house painter. As a youth, he attended New York University,[citation needed] hustled pool and fought some prizefights – the latter two providing crucial background for his two greatest films, The Hustler and Body and Soul, respectively. He changed his name from Rosen to Rossen in 1931.

He started his theatrical career as a stage manager and director in stock and off-Broadway productions, mainly in the social and radical theaters that flourished in New York in the early and mid-1930s, as did John Huston, Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey. In 1932 Rossen directed John Wexley's Steel, about labor agitation, and Richard Maibaum's The Tree, about a lynching. A year later Rossen directed Birthright, in which Maibaum attacked Nazism, which had just triumphed in Germany with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

In 1935, Rossen wrote and directed his first play, The Body Beautiful, a comedy about a naive burlesque dancer. Although the play closed after four performances, Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy was so impressed that he signed Rossen to a personal screenwriting contract.

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