DeMille wins Oscar
On March 19 1953 legendary filmmaker Cecil B.DeMille wins the only Academy Award of his career when The Greatest Show on Earth takes home an Oscar for Best Picture.The film a big-budget extravaganza about circus life starred Charlton Heston Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde.Born in Ashfield Massachusetts in 1881 DeMille came from a theatrical family and studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
In 1913 hoping to exploit the fledgling movie industry he joined with Jesse Lasky Samuel Goldwyn and Arthur Freed in forming the Jesse L.Lasky Feature Play Company which later grew into Paramount Pictures.He produced and co-directed a silent western called The Squaw Man (1914) which at six reels was the first feature-length film made in the small town of Hollywood California.During the next few years DeMille was responsible for a string of commercially successful movies and became the archetype of the Hollywood director as a dashing and assertive figure.
After World War I he made comedies with sexual themes such as Male and Female (1919) and The Affairs of Anatol (1921).These and other Hollywood movies of the postwar period led to a series of scandals in which the industry was forced to defend itself against charges of immorality.In response DeMille made the The Ten Commandments (1923) which combined a modern-day morality tale with an elaborate biblical flashback.
Three years later he released The King of Kings (1927) a biblical epic. Having found a winning genre he made a series of lavish biblical and historical epics in the 1930s including The Sign of the Cross (1932) the exotic Cleopatra (1934) and The Crusades (1935).Henceforth DeMille concentrated on big-budget spectacles and his last three filmsSamson and Delilah (1949) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and a second version of The Ten Commandments (1956)were all progressively bigger than anything he had done before.In all he made some 70 films.Although rarely critically acclaimed his spectacles attracted vast audiences and he was a dominant figure in Hollywood for decades.
His only Oscar was for The Greatest Show on Earth but that year he also received the Irving G.Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.In 1950 he had received a special Academy Award for 37 years of brilliant showmanship.
In 1952 the Golden Globe Awards introduced the Cecil B.DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.The first Cecil B.
DeMille Award went appropriately to Cecil B.DeMille.He died in 1959.
