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André De Toth
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André de Toth (born Sasvári Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi Tóth Endre Antal Mihály on May 15 1912 - died October 27 2002) was an American filmmaker born and raised in Makó, Csongrád, Austria-Hungary. He directed the 3-D film House of Wax, despite being unable to see in 3-D himself, having lost an eye at an early age. He is known for his gritty B movies in the western and crime genres.
r earning a law degree from the Royal Hungarian University in the early 1930s, de Toth, who had won acclaim for plays written while still a college student, acquired mentorship from celebrated playwright Ferenc Molnár and entered the theater scene in Budapest.
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Encyclopedia
André de Toth (born Sasvári Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi Tóth Endre Antal Mihály on May 15 1912 - died October 27 2002) was an American filmmaker born and raised in Makó, Csongrád, Austria-Hungary. He directed the 3-D film House of Wax, despite being unable to see in 3-D himself, having lost an eye at an early age. He is known for his gritty B movies in the western and crime genres.
Career
After earning a law degree from the Royal Hungarian University in the early 1930s, de Toth, who had won acclaim for plays written while still a college student, acquired mentorship from celebrated playwright Ferenc Molnár and entered the theater scene in Budapest. From that involvement he segued to the film industry and worked as a writer, assistant director, editor and sometime actor.
In 1939 he directed five films just before war began in Europe. Several of these pictures received significant release in the Hungarian communities in the United States. De Toth went to England, spent several years as an assistant to fellow Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda, and eventually moved to the Los Angeles in 1942.
Based on his Hungarian films, the production work for Korda and writing he had done on American projects during earlier stints in Los Angeles, de Toth was given an oral contract as a director at Columbia from which he ultimately extricated himself by litigation.
Because he preferred working as an independent, de Toth had no “A” budgets early in his career and had to supplement his directing income with writing assignments, often uncredited. Introduced to Westerns by John Ford, de Toth worked mostly in that genre throughout the 1950s, often bringing elements of noir style into those films.
While he is often remembered as the director of the earliest and most successful 3-D film, House of Wax, (all the more remarkable since, like Ford, Fritz Lang, and Raoul Walsh, de Toth had only one good eye), he was also responsible for two of the noir cycle's most unusual examples: Pittfall and Crime Wave.
In 1996, he published his memoirs entitled Fragments – Portraits from the Inside (London: Faber and Faber, 1994) and lived, until his death from an aneurysm on 27 October, 2002 at age 89, a stone's throw from the Warner ranch in Burbank, California. He is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills.
Personal life
Some of his spouses were:
- Marie Louise Stratton (1953 - 1982) (divorced) 2 children
- Veronica Lake (13 December 1944 - 2 June 1952) (divorced) 3 children
- Ann Green (? - 27 October 2002) (his death)
De Toth was married seven times, including to Veronica Lake from 1944 to 1952 with whom he fathered a son, Andre Anthony Michael De Toth, born October 25, 1945, in Los Angeles, California and a daughter, Diana De Toth, born October 16, 1948. He also had 17 other children in total.
Selected Filmography
- Ramrod (1947)
- Pittfall (1948)
- The Gunfighter (1950) (writer only. Nominated for Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story)
- Man in the Saddle (1951)
- Springfield Rifle (1952)
- Carson City (1952)
- House of Wax (1953) (3D)
- The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953) (3D)
- Thunder Over the Plains (1953)
- Crime Wave (1954)
- Riding Shotgun (1954)
- The Bounty Hunter (1954)
- The Indian Fighter (1955)
- Play Dirty (1968)
Further reading
- Anthony Slide (editor), De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in front of the Camera (Faber, 1996)
External links
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