Russian-born film and stage director, who had a successful series of shows on Broadway before entering Hollywood. Mamoulian made 16 films in the 29 years of his cinema career. He was among the liberators of cinema who created his unique rhythm and poetic stylization by blending sound, visuals and camera movement with montage effects. In 1982 Mamoulian received the Directors Guild of America D.W. Griffith Award for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to motion pictures. His most famous films include Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1932), starring Fredric March, and Queen Christina (1933), starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

"What I feel strongly is that the artist - and I broaden this - the great majority of artists in every field are betraying mankind. To me, the hope of the future is in the arts. It's not in politics. It's not in economics. It's not in religion. It's not in the arts. Because the arts are the only truly universal medium. The whole thing should serve to remind you that man still has a potential, that he's not just crawling on earth. He still has wings and he can fly. We need this reminder of faith, of optimism, to reestablish the dignity of a human being." (Mamoulian in Directing the Film by Eric Sherman, 1976)

Rouben Mamoulian was born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), Georgia, of Armenian descent. His father was a bank president. Mamoulian spent part of his childhood in Paris and was trained under Vakhtangov and Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1918 Mamoulian organized his own drama studio in Tiflis and two years later he toured in England. He studied drama at the University of London and directed there in 1922 his first play.

In 1923 he moved to America and directed for three years operas and operettas at the George Eastman Theater in Rochester, N.Y. In 1926 he began teaching and produced many notable plays for the theatre Guild, including DuBose Heyward's Porgy (1927). He later directed the premiere of George Gershwin's operatic version of the play, Porgy and Bess (1935).

As a result of his growing reputation in the theatre world, Mamoulian was offered a seven-year contract in the Hollywood film business. However, Mamoulian answered that he signs only short contracts without options. After five weeks studying the mechanics of motion picture making he was ready to direct. His first talking films for Paramount Pictures were acclaimed among the most innovative sound films of the day. Applause (1929) was Mamoulian's first step to free camera and soundtrack from the constraints of the early days of the sound stage. Mamoulian put his camera booth on wheels in order to move it about. He also used two cameras to increase the number of possible angels. His other films from this experimental period include the horror classic Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1932) which used subjective camera, special camera filters, and synthetic sounds. Jekyll's arrival at the medical theater is a long, uncut take, seen from his point of view from his house to the university. "I do believe the cinema is in imagery, not in words," Mamoulian once said. Fredric March won an Academy Award for his performance as the kindly doctor and evil Hyde. The film is considered the best adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. The Jeanette MacDonald - Maurice Chevalier musical Love Me Tonight (1932) had big, densely-populated musical set-pieces. Mamoulian's gangster melodrama City Streets (1931), starring Sylvia Sidney, Gary Cooper, and Paul Lukas, was based on Ernest Booth's story Ladies of the Mob. Dashiell Hammett, who was at the height of his literary career and had been signed to create original stories for the screen, co-wrote the script.

Queen Christina (1933) was a tour de force for Greta Garbo. It includes one of the most famous moments in Garbo's career. She glides around an inn room, in which she has slept with her lover, memorizing every moment for posterity. The director's advice for his star was, "I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience." The camera proceed from a long-shot to a final, extended close-up of the actress's unmoving face. In the final scene she stands in the prow of the ship, the wind blowing her hair. Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957), the general manager of MGM, wanted a happy ending. Laurence Olivier was hired for the male lead, but Garbo had him booted off the production in favour of John Gilbert. The censors kept a close eye on the script due to Queen Christina's supposedly bisexual tendencies. The film did poorly in America, but was popular in Europe. Becky Sharp (1935), based on Thackeray's classic novel Vanity Fair, was noted as the first feature in three-color Technicolor. It won the color prize at the third Venice Film Festival.

"Director Rouben Mamoulian, who took over when Lowell Shwrman died, did a remarkable job with color experimentation. He decided to use color thematically to express character mood, and added more and more color as the film progresses and the plot thickens. Every shot looks color-coordinated. The most famous sequence in the panicky exit of the quests at the Duchess of Richmond's gala in Belgium on the eve of the battle of Waterloo - rather than having all the red-jacketed soldiers in attendance exit first (as would be the case), Mamoulian had guests leave according to their color group so only the one in red remained in the ballroom." (Danny Peary in Guide for the Film Fanatic, 1986)

In The Mark of Zorro (1940) Mamoulian combined elemets from Robin Hood and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Tyrone Power played the role of the foppish Don Diego, who actually is Señor Zorro, a mysterious vigilante and swordsman. He leads his caballeros and peasants against the tyrannical Don Luis Quintero and Captain Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone). Power's duel with Rathbone is the highlight of the film. Blood and Sand (1941) was based on the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibanez. It had been filmed in 1922, starring Rudolph Valentino. In the new version Tyrone Power played the great but naive matador, Juan. Linda Danell was his devoted sweetheart and wife and Rita Hayworth a temptress, Dona Sol. "Was it Oscar Wilde who said, 'The sphinx is an enigma which has no solution.' That's Rita. Casting her was a hunch, something I felt rather than saw. I've always been strong on my impressions of people, usually first impressions. Nobody else could have played it, because you couldn't play Dona Sol, you had to be it. Garbo is the only other woman who could have done it... The rarest thing on stage or screen is a beautiful walk. On the screen there is Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Cyd Charisse and Rita Hayworth, and after that... period." (Mamoulian in Rita Hayworth by John Kobal, 1978) Mamoulian's film pulsed again with color and had references to works of such Spanish painters as El Greco and Goya. Mamoulian considered red the most exciting color. "A progression of color should lead to a climax, which can only be red," he has argued. "Not blue, not yellow, red."

Mamoulian periodically returned to the Broadway stage when his ideas clashed with the Hollywood studio hierarchy. In 1944 he was removed from Laura after a few days' shooting and replaced by Otto Preminger. By the late 1950s his poetic visions received little understanding. " I feel that any subject - it doesn't have to be a fantasy - any subject should be approached from a poetical point of view, and therefore stylized," Mamoulian explained. He lost in 1958 assignment of directing the film version of Porgy and Bess, and he was also fired from the set of Cleopatra. Both films turned out to be critical and commercial failures. When Mamoulian abandoned Cleopatra, $7 million had been spent, and Mankiewicz took over.

For the theatre Mamoulian directed the premiers of such landmark productions as Oklahoma (1943), Carousel (1945), and Lost in the Stars (1949). Among his later films were Summer Holiday (1948), a musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and Silk Stockings, (1957), a remake of Ninotchka, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. In the films an icy female Soviet official is sent to the West where she is melted by romance. Astaire did a rock 'n' roll number which both he and Cole Porter, the composer, loathed. Ninotchka and Silk Stockings were forbidden in Finland because of their jokes about the Soviet system. In 1982 Mamoulian received the Directors Guild of America D.W. Griffith Award. Mamoulian died in Los Angeles on December 4, 1987.

For further reading: Mamoulian by Tom Milne (1969); Directing the Film: Film Directors on Their Art by Eric Sherman (1976); The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz (1994); Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian by Mark Spergel (1993) - See also: Silk Stockings

Films:

• APPLAUSE, 1929 - written by Garrett Fort, novel by Beth Brown
• CITY STREETS, 1931 - written by Max Marcin, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Dashiell Hammett, story 'Ladies of the Mob' by Ernest Booth
• DR. JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, 1932 - screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein, Percy Heath, novel by R.L. Stevenson
• LOVE ME TONIGHT, 1932 - written by Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young, George Marion Jnr, play 'Taylor in the Château' by Leopold Marchand and Paul Armont
• SONG OF SONGS, 1933 - screenplay by Leo Birinsky, Samuel Hoffenstein, play Edward Sheldon, based on the novel 'Das hohe Lied' by Herman Sudermann
• QUEEN CHRISTINA, 1933 - screenplay by H.M. Harwood, Salka Viertel and S. N. Behrman, based on the story by Viertel and Margaret Levin. "I have been memorising this room. In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room." (Greta Garbo)
• WE LIVE AGAIN, 1934 - screenplay by Preston Sturges, Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins, based on the novel Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
• BECKY SHARP, 1935 - screenplay by Francis Edward Faragoh, play by Landon Mitchell, based on Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray.
• THE GAY DESPERADO, 1936 - screenplay by Wallace Smith, story by Leo Birinski
• HIGH WIDE AND HANDSOME, 1937 - written by Oscar Hammerstein II
• GOLDEN BOY, 1939 - written by Lewis Meltzer, Daniel Taradash, Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman, play by Clifford Odets
• THE MARK OF ZORRO, 1940 - written by John Tainton Foote, Garrett Fort, Bess Meredyth, starring Tyrone Power, Basil Rathbone, J. Edward Bromberg.
• BLOOD AND SAND, 1941- screenplay by Jo Swerling, based on the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth. (Remake of the Rudolph Valentino film from 1922.)
• RINGS ON HER FINGERS, 1942 - written by Ken Englund
• SUMMER HOLIDAY, 1948 - written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Ralph Blane, play 'Ah Wilderness' by Eugene O'Neill
• SILK STOCKINGS, 1957 - written by Leonard Gersche, Leonard Spiegelgass, play by George S. Kaufman, Leueen McGrath, Abe Burrows, original play by Melchior Bronner

Works as a writer:

• SADIE THOMPSON, 1944 (collaboration)
• ARMS AND THE GIRL, 1950 (collaboration)
• ABIGAYIL, 1964 (a children's story)
• HAMLET REVISED AND INTERPRETED, 1965 (a drama textbook)