Jean Negulesco - Bonnie

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The following biography is from the archives of askART.
Jean Negulesco (1900-1993) Film Director and Artist
Name also spelt: Ion Negulescu
Born 26 February 1900 at Craiova, Doli, Romania.  Died 18 July 1993 at Marbella, Spain. 

His life was recorded by him in his witty and fascinating autobiography, Things I Did and Things I Think I Did. In Paris as a young man he was a friend of Constantin Brancusi and many other famous artistic and literary people in Montparnasse and Montmartre.

As a younger director, Negulesco directed such gritty Hollywood classics in the noir category as Road House (1948) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). In the same year, Negulesco directed Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre also in The Conspirators (1944), along with Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid. 

Jean Negelescu married actress Ruth “Dusty” Anderson in 1946. In 1946, Negulesco directed Three Strangers, from a screenplay by John Huston. Once again, for the third time, he worked with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. 
Negulesco was also noted at this time for his widely-praised Johnny Belinda (1948), starring Jane Wyman. That film won an Oscar for Best Actress for Jane Wyman and an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Negulesco himself. 

In 1949, Negulesco directed a film in London entitled Britannia Mews, also sometimes known as The Forbidden Street. This film, set in Victorian London, defies categorisation, but it could perhaps be described as a bizarre melodrama. 

In 1950, Negulesco directed another charming and compelling film in England entitled The Mudlark. This is a story of a young orphan who sleeps in a barrel and lives by finding things of small value which have been dropped into the mud of the banks of the River Thames ('a mudlark'). The film is a classic, funny and sad, ironical and satirical all at once. It also contains a brilliantly articulate and thundering speech by Disraeli in Parliament about the deprivations of the poor, and the need for assisting them. This is but one of countless film classics which cannot be acquired commercially on video or DVD, and must be obtained from a collector, sought for on Ebay, or recorded off the air in the unlikely event that it might be shown. The same is true of many of Negulesco's films, which is why the Foundation steadily acquires viewing copies of the rare and commercially unobtainable films of the Romanian personalities who concern us. 

Later in his career, Negulesco settled back into vintage 1950s tales of a less harrowing nature, including some classics such as Woman's World (1954) and The Best of Everything (1959), both of which are fascinating studies of the manners and mores of the time and watching them is like stepping into a perfectly preserved time capsule. Daddy Long Legs (1955) had its charming moments, starring an elderly Fred Astaire who could still dance like a floating cloud, and a pert Lesley Caron. But that film is now suffocating in its saccharine vacuity and stupefying for its atrocious designs and artwork. 

Clearly, this was the side of Negulesco as a director we would rather not know about. To call it excessively naff would be to flatter it. Negulesco was a man of great ability who sometimes went soft at the centre. 

Source:
"Jean Negulesco," Prodan Romanian Cultural Foundation, Web, May 2016