Background
Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg on May 29, 1894 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. His father was Moses (Morris) Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary.
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Josef von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg on May 29, 1894 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. His father was Moses (Morris) Sternberg, a former soldier in the army of Austria-Hungary.
He was brought to the United States by his parents when he was seven. After completing his early schooling in Manhattan, he returned to Vienna to continue his education. Sternberg dropped out of Jamaica High School and worked as an errand boy in a lace warehouse. He later obtained a job cleaning and repairing movie prints. By about 1915 he was working for William A. Brady at the World Film Company at Fort Lee, New Jersey. There he was mentored by Emile Chautard and other French-speaking directors and cinematographers at World. Chautard hired Sternberg as an assistant director in 1919 for a version of The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Sternberg made his directorial début in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, considered by some historians to be the first American independent film.
He began his film career with a company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he advanced to become an editor and title-writer. Sternberg made some training films while serving with the army Signal Corps during World War I. At the end of the war he returned to the Film industry, and graduated to scenarist and assistant director. A partnership with actor George K. Arthur resulted in The Salvation Hunters, an independent production which was the first film that Sternberg directed.
The Salvation Hunters was a sufficiently impressive debut to be bought for release by United Artists and Sternberg signed a contract with MGM. When this association did not fare well, Charles Chaplin hired him to direct A Woman of the Sea, a film that was never released. In 1926 Sternberg began directing for Paramount, gaining prominence with the gangster film Underworld and The Last Command, which starred Emil Jannings. Having directed his first sound film, Thunderbolt, in 1929, he went to Germany to direct The Blue Angel, which starred, in addition to Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, around whom most of his subsequent films until the mid-1930s revolved.
The success of his films with Dietrich (including Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress) gave Sternberg the freedom to indulge in visual stylistics unseen in other Hollywood films of the period (he also occasionally functioned as his own cinematographer). In 1935 he followed his mentor at Paramount, B. P. Schulberg, to Columbia Pictures, where he filmed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre. A lavish screen adaptation of Claudius, begun in Britain in 1937, was never completed due to a variety of setbacks. Only two of the handful of films he made during the remainder of his directorial career stand out. The Shanghai Gesture, from 1941, recaptured the atmosphere of his earlier work. The Saga of Anatahan, an intensely personal project financed by von Sternberg himself, was made in Japan in 1953. Though appreciated by the critics, it was a financial failure. In his later years, he lectured at universities and toward the end of his life made many appearances at retrospectives of his own work.
He wrote an autobiographical work Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965).
(The brilliant director's personal summary of his extremel...)
(The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg (The International Film...)
(This film is also known as The Saga of Anatahan, is a 195...)
1953(An American Tragedy: Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, Fran...)
1931With Signal Corps, World War I.
He married Riza Royce in 1926 and they divorced in 1930. Jean Annette McBride was his second wife(1945–1947). And then Sternberg married Meri Otis Wilner (1948–1969) - they had 1 child.