{"id":7835,"title":"Nicholas Ray","kind":"bio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/nicholas-ray","version":"0a10d83b36d4d78ed31bcffbc99558e43a57a2872fbad4d82e14d4eb1e196d07","modified":"2011-06-18T00:00:43+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":["bio"],"metadata":[{"label":"First name","value":"Nicholas","url":null},{"label":"Last name","value":"Ray","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Nicholas Ray.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/nicholas-ray.","publication":null,"risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/7835.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":7157},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":685}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"The auteurists\u0027 favorite, Nicholas Ray made movies for little more than a decade, but his films are among the most incisive, bizarre, and intelligent of the 1950s. A believer that great directors leave distinctive signatures on their work, Ray\u0027s eye for setting, color, and kinetic action merged with a socially conscious interest in personal psychology to reveal a darkness at odds with \u0022normalcy\u0022 in such films as In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), and his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Born and raised in Wisconsin, Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. got kicked out of high school numerous times, but he also wrote local radio shows that won him admission to college. Renaming himself Nick Ray in 1931, Ray\u0027s eclectic post-high school education included a year at the University of Chicago and several months at Frank Lloyd Wright\u0027s Taliesin art colony, where he studied architecture and drama. Moving to New York in 1932, Ray became active in left-wing theater, including acting in Elia Kazan\u0027s directorial debut for the Theater of Action, and working on a Joseph Losey production for the Federal Theater Project. Out of the FTP by 1940, Ray worked in radio and was hired by John Houseman to produce radio programs for the Office of War Information. Ray subsequently earned his first Hollywood experience as an assistant on Kazan\u0027s debut film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). After assisting on several other films and directing a Broadway show and a TV show, Ray headed back to Hollywood to work for Houseman at RKO on a film adaptation of Thieves Like Us, retitled They Live By Night (1949). Given the chance to direct, Ray infused the film with an edgy intimacy and sympathy for the young outlaw lovers. Though barely noticed on its first release, They Live By Night was championed by the Cahiers du Cin\u00E9ma critics and became one of his most highly regarded films. Staying on with RKO after Howard Hughes bought it, Ray directed murder-mystery A Woman\u0027s Secret (1949), co-starring his second wife-to-be, Gloria Grahame, and was loaned out to direct Humphrey Bogart as a sympathetic lawyer to delinquent juvenile John Derek in Knock on Any Door (1949). Derek\u0027s desire in Knock to \u0022live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse\u0022 would effectively sum up the fate of future Rebel star James Dean. Ray then teamed Bogart and Grahame in the potent noir In a Lonely Place (1950). Centering on a screenwriter who may be a murderer and his starlet lover, In a Lonely Place was both a lacerating examination of Hollywood and male violence, and a diagnosis of Ray and Grahame\u0027s failing marriage. Protected by Hughes from the blacklist, Ray churned out several more films for RKO, including a Technicolor combat movie, The Flying Leathernecks (1951), starring John Wayne and Robert Ryan, and the pristinely black, white, and gray rural noir On Dangerous Ground (1951), featuring Ryan as an urban cop redeemed by Ida Lupino. After his skillful rodeo drama, The Lusty Men (1952), featuring Mitchum, Arthur Kennedy, and Susan Hayward in a loaded love triangle, Ray left RKO in 1953. Backed by his agent Lew Wasserman, Ray worked steadily for the rest of the decade. Ray\u0027s first film as a free agent was also his most brilliantly strange. A floridly colored Western, Johnny Guitar (1954) pitted stalwart saloon owner Joan Crawford against twitchy, jealous townswoman Mercedes McCambridge with laconic titular character Sterling Hayden as Crawford\u0027s old boyfriend. Though the fight is allegedly about property, and allegorically about the Communist witch hunts, McCambridge\u0027s sexual hysteria and Crawford\u0027s butch wardrobe of blue jeans, bright shirts, and the best lipstick in the West suggested a kinkier undercurrent. Ray followed his deliriously Freudian oater with Run for Cover (1955), a Western featuring James Cagney and John Derek in an Oedipally fraught relationship. After his Westerns, Ray set to work on an original story about contemporary youth. Starring James Dean in his definitive performance, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) became one of the decade\u0027s most trenchant statements on suburban-bred teen alienation. Suffering from weak and/or negligent parenting, Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo\u0027s disaffected trio seethe with frustration and act out with misdirected violence and a pointless, lethal chickie run, while creating an alternative familial world. Ray\u0027s widescreen compositions reveal Dean\u0027s estrangement at home and the impossibility of the trio\u0027s imagined life in an abandoned mansion, while his masterful use of color, particularly Dean\u0027s red jacket, speaks to the emotional turmoil. With Dean\u0027s death days before its release, Rebel Without a Cause became a hit and earned Oscar nominations for Wood, Mineo, and Ray\u0027s story (Dean was nominated for East of Eden [1955] instead). Returning to the underside of suburbia in Bigger Than Life (1956), Ray depicted the extreme results of emphasizing surface achievement, as drug-addled father James Mason\u0027s megalomaniacal pursuit of perfection turns into child abuse. More downbeat, Bigger Than Life did not repeat Rebel\u0027s success. After another offbeat Western, The True Story of Jesse James (1957), Ray headed to Europe to direct Bitter Victory (1957), a somber war drama starring Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens as Burton\u0027s jealous rival. Taking any assignment he could find, Ray returned to the U.S. to direct Budd Schulberg\u0027s production Wind Across the Everglades (1958). An odd story about a 19th century Florida gamekeeper, Wind was marred by creative conflicts between Ray and Schulberg. Stylish gangland story Party Girl (1958) was Ray\u0027s last Hollywood film. Settling in Europe after shooting The Savage Innocents (1959) in England and Italy, Ray turned to epics with King of Kings (1961), a handsome widescreen rendering of the life of Christ. While shooting his next epic, 55 Days at Peking (1963), however, Ray suffered a heart attack and was replaced, ending his mainstream career. After kicking around Europe, Ray returned to the U.S. for an aborted documentary on the Chicago Seven in 1969, losing his sight in one eye shortly after. From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught filmmaking at Harpur College (part of the State University of New York at Binghamton) where he and his students produced We Can\u0027t Go Home Again, an ambitious autobiographical film employing multiple superimpositions. He used the synthesizer at the Experimental Television Center to experiment with effects and multi-screen presentations for the film. An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. Settling in New York City in 1976, Ray played a small role in director/fan Wim Wenders\u0027 film The American Friend (1977). Though he was diagnosed with cancer in 1977, Ray appeared in Milos Forman\u0027s Hair (1979), and began a collaboration with Wenders on Lightning Over Water (1980), a documentary of Ray\u0027s last days. Ray died in 1979, shortly after he and Wenders stopped production. He died of lung cancer on June 16, 1979 at the age of 67 in New York City, New York.","offset":0,"nextOffset":null,"totalCharacters":7157,"complete":true},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}