Vincente Minnelli (; born Lester Anthony Minnelli; February 28, 1903 – July 25, 1986) was an American stage director and film director. From a career spanning over half a century, he is best known for his sophisticated innovation and artistry in musical films. , six of his films have been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Born in Chicago to theatrical parents, Minnelli made his stage debut at age three in his family's theater. He began his theatrical career as a costume designer for the Balaban and Katz theaters. In 1932, the Paramount-Publix theater chain acquired Balaban and Katz and Minnelli moved to New York to work in Paramount's theaters there. He later became Radio City Music Hall's chief costume designer and then art director, and directed Broadway musicals including At Home Abroad. In 1937, Minnelli briefly worked for Paramount Pictures, but then returned to Broadway where he directed more shows including Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's last work together, Very Warm for May.
In 1940, Arthur Freed brought Minnelli to Hollywood to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he directed sequences in Babes on Broadway (1941) and Panama Hattie (1942). He made his directorial film debut with Cabin in the Sky (1943). A year later, Minnelli directed Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) starring Judy Garland. He married Garland a year later, and their daughter Liza was born in 1946. He subsequently directed Garland in The Clock (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1945) and The Pirate (1948). They divorced in 1951.
In the 1950s, Minnelli directed numerous comedies, dramas and musicals, including Father of the Bride (1950), An American in Paris (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Lust for Life (1956) and Gigi (1958). An American in Paris and Gigi both won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Minnelli won Best Director for Gigi.
In the early 1960s, failed film projects soured Minnelli's relationship with MGM. He formed his own production company, which partnered with MGM and 20th Century Fox. He then left MGM in 1966. His last films were On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and A Matter of Time (1976), starring his daughter Liza.
Background and early life Vincente Minnelli was born Lester Anthony Minnelli, in Chicago on February 28, 1903, to Mina Mary LaLouche LeBeau and Vincent Charles Minnelli.
Vincent Charles' father Vincenzo was a Sicilian and a professor of music. Vincenzo's brother Domenico was Vice-Chancellor of the Gran Corte Civile in Palermo at the time he helped organize the January 12, 1848, uprising there which began the Sicilian revolution of 1848, in which Vincenzo also took part. Vincenzo and Dominico were forced to leave Sicily after the collapse of the provisional Sicilian government. Vincenzo reportedly hid in the catacombs of Palermo for 18 months before being smuggled onto a New York-bound fruit steamer. He eventually became the head of the music department at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where Vincent Charles was born.
Mina was born in Chicago of French-Canadian and, on her mother's side, probably Native American descent. Mina's mother recognized Mina's talent and took her to auditions. Mina's siblings were performers as well: her sister Amy was a trapeze artist with the Ringling Brothers Circus, and her brother was an equestrian before an illness required him to turn to clowning and then to selling candy.
Vincent Charles and his brother Frank founded the Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater, which toured small towns in the Midwest. Vincent Charles was the musical director. He met Mina when she starred in one of the company's productions; although they initially argued over the music that accompanied her performance, they married in November 1894.
Vincente claimed in his autobiography that he (Lester) was Vincent Charles and Mina's only surviving child, that their first two sons, twins, had died before he was born and their third in Lester's infancy. A later biographer found Minnelli's memories of his brothers to be almost entirely inaccurate, most of all in omitting his brother Paul Felix, four years older and developmentally disabled, who lived to the age of sixty.
Lester spent his early years on the road with his parents. At age three, he made his debut on stage portraying Little Willie in East Lynne, alongside his mother performing dual roles as Lady Isabel and Madame Vine. When the tent theater succumbed to fire, flood and the rise of motion pictures, the Minnellis settled in Vincent Charles' hometown of Delaware, Ohio. Lester spent his first three years of high school there at St. Mary's. Since St. Mary's had no twelfth grade, he spent his last year at Willis High School. There, he appeared in a school production of H.M.S. Pinafore and starred in The Fortune Hunter at the Delaware Opera House.
Following his high school graduation, Minnelli moved to Chicago, where he lived briefly with his maternal grandmother Le Beau and his aunt Amy. In search of a job, Minnelli took his portfolio of watercolor paintings to the Marshall Field's department store. Arthur Valair Fraser, the store's display director, reviewed his portfolio and hired him immediately as an apprentice window dresser. There, the store windows were changed four times a year with elaborate themes matched to each corresponding season. Minnelli was first assigned to design the men's store, but he instead asked to design windows on Wabash Avenue where furniture and decorative antique items were frequently rearranged. Meanwhile, Minnelli enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, intending to become a painter. However, he dropped out due to his lack of interest in the curriculum.
Stage career While working at Marshall Field's, Minnelli met a woman who had come to borrow stage props for an acting company that performed behind the Radical Book Shop. She asked him to join them. Minnelli read for the part of a retired sea captain in Eugene O'Neill's play Where the Cross Is Made. He disliked the play and the environment and abandoned acting for good, but remained a frequent attendee of Chicago's theaters. In his spare time, he painted watercolor sketches of contemporary theatre actors, including Ina Claire and Mary Nash. Encouraged by his friends, Minnelli sold his paintings backstage, and earned enough money to live on his own. One night, while selling his artwork backstage, he was approached by Paul Stone, who admired Minnelli's pictorial composition. "If you can do this sort of thing, you can become a fine photographer," Stone told him.
Minnelli left his Marshall Field's job, and worked for Stone as an assistant photographer. Stone specialized in photographing actors and socialites from Chicago's theater district at theatrical luminaries, society matrons and wedding parties. At Stone's Raymor studio, Minnelli photographed numerous celebrities, including Ina Claire, where he coaxed them into capturing their best angles. Minnelli reflected, "Stone's photography was soft, but in sharp focus, so that it could reproduce on the printed page. This taught me a way of creating mood." Months later, Stone suffered a nervous breakdown, and Minnelli assumed his photography duties. Feeling he was not suited for photography as a profession, Minnelli grew dissatisfied and began reading Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell's 1911 biography of James McNeill Whistler, an American painter. Inspired by Whistler's art techniques, Minnelli immersed himself in impressionist and surrealist painters, such as Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. He also admired the experimental films of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel, and the writings of Sigmund Freud. Around this time, Minnelli dropped Lester from his name, replacing it with "Vincente"; he added the final "e" in order to seem more sophisticated and elegant.
Next, Minnelli approached Frank Cambria, who headed the Chicago Theatre, which was a part of the Balaban and Katz theater chain. He told Cambria that he should open his own costume department, and allow him to run it. Cambria took Minnelli to A. J. Balaban's office, where he was hired as a costume and set designer. Assigned to give the stage productions "a custom touch", Minnelli was shocked the costume department operated on meager budgets. At the time, theatre productions ran one week at the Chicago Theatre where the sets and costumes were disassembled and reused at the Tivoli and Uptown Theatre.
In 1931, Balaban and Katz merged with the Paramount-Publix theater chain, and Minnelli was asked to work on New York stage productions for $150 a week. He left Chicago and rented a tiny Greenwich Village apartment. At Paramount, Minnelli worked exclusively in costumes, and was prevented from designing sets because he wasn't in the set designers' union. He was eventually accepted into the union membership thanks to sponsorship from J. Woodman Thompson, a prominent stage designer. His first Broadway assignment was designing the show curtain for Earl Carroll's 1931 edition of the Vanities musical revue. Taking inspiration from Léon Bakst's designs for the Ballets Russes, Minnelli fashioned a –tall green and silver curtain to accompany the Art Deco theatrical style. Impressed, Carroll rehired Minnelli as a costume and set designer for the 1932 Vanities.
By this time, Grace Moore asked Minnelli to supervise the art direction for the operetta, The Dubarry. During rehearsals, Minnelli and Moore had creative differences but remained cordial. The operetta had tryouts in Boston, and premiered in New York in November 1932 where it ran for 87 performances. Based on his success, Paramount executives selected him for costume and set design for the 1933 edition of Ziegfeld Follies. However, by 1933, Paramount-Publix filed for bankruptcy protection, in which Adolph Zukor fired B. P. Schulberg as the studio's head of production and began a corporate restructuring. Paramount's East Coast studios were relocated to Astoria, New York, but it was decided their touring theatre unit was no longer profitable and was closed down in favor of touring big bands.
In December 1932, Minnelli was hired as the chief costume designer for the newly-opened Radio City Music Hall. On Thursday nights every week, the Music Hall held a lavish stage performance by the Roxettes before the one-week run for a film. Each week, Minnelli, art director Clark Robinson, and dance director Russell Markert had their rehearsals harshly criticized by theatre impresario Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel. Robinson immediately resigned after one heated exchange with Rothafel, who then selected Minnelli as the new art director., Minnelli was the designer of the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers", a piece that is still performed today by The Rockettes in their Christmas Spectacular. In July 1933, Minnelli designed the "Water Lily" ballet, a Cuban potpourri illustrated with a backdrop of fighting cocks, a Big Top interior for a circus number, and a Rue de la Paix dress shop to display the Roxettes. In December 1933, Minnelli art-directed a production of the Scheherazade suite by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His efforts were applauded in the mainstream press, including The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune.