Robert Wise

Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American film director, producer, and editor. He won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for both West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and directed and produced The Sand Pebbles (1966), which was nominated for Best Picture. Among his other films are The Body Snatcher (1945), Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Gobi (1953), This Could Be The Night (1957), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live! (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Hindenburg (1975) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Wise was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1985 through 1988. Robert Wise has been viewed as a craftsman, inclined to let the (sometimes studio-assigned) story concept set the style. Later cineastes, such as Martin Scorsese, insist that despite Wise's legendary workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Wise achieved critical success as a director in a striking variety of film genres: horror, noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. Wise's meticulous preparation may have been largely motivated by studio budget constraints, but advanced the moviemaking art. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Robert Wise »