Jules Dassin mini-bio: Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin, one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem and attended Morris High School in the Bronx graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934 he became an actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to the directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with the adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas, as Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), and Night and the City (1950) While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952, and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activites Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953, and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low budget film, Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later Dassin co-starred opposite Melina Mercouri in his film Pote tin Kyriaki (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964).Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joseph Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 60s and 70s. In 1966 Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Melina Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife, Melina Mercuri.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by the flu, on March 31, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece.
