Jean Negulesco

Jean Negulesco (Craiova, Romania, 1900 - Marbella, Spain, 1993) was a painter who later built most of his career as a film director and screenwriter in the United States. As a young man he worked as a painter in Bucharest and then trained in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian. In 1927 he travelled to New York for an exhibition of his paintings and settled there.

In California he turned to film, first working as a portraitist and then making an experimental feature that he financed, wrote and directed himself. Through the film's star he found work at Paramount, where he contributed to montages and scripts. By the late 1930s he was receiving directing credits, and at Warner Bros., which he joined in 1940, he gained a reputation for musical short subjects with unusual camera angles and striking use of shadow. The studio called them "tone poems." His first credited feature there was Singapore Woman (1941).

In 1948 he received an Academy Award nomination for directing Johnny Belinda. He then went to 20th Century-Fox, where he became the first director to make two CinemaScope films, How to Marry a Millionaire, with Marilyn Monroe, and Three Coins in the Fountain. The former earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Film. From the late 1960s he lived in Marbella, Spain, where he died at 93. He wrote an autobiography, Things I Did and Things I Think I Did. His early training as a painter was the starting point for a wide filmography of melodrama and comedy, which is what he is best remembered for.