Michael Curtiz (; born Manó Kaminer; from 1905 Mihály Kertész; ; December 25, 1886 April 10, 1962) was a Hungarian and American film director, recognized as one of the most prolific directors in history. He directed classic films from the silent era and numerous others during Hollywood's Golden Age, when the studio system was prevalent.
Curtiz was already a well-known director in Europe when Warner Bros. invited him to Hollywood in 1926, when he was 39 years of age. He had already directed 64 films in Europe, and soon helped Warner Bros. become the fastest-growing movie studio. He directed 102 films during his Hollywood career, mostly at Warners, where he directed ten actors to Oscar nominations. James Cagney and Joan Crawford won their only Academy Awards under Curtiz's direction. He put Doris Day and John Garfield on screen for the first time, and he made stars of Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis. He himself was nominated five times, and won twice, once for Best Short Subject for Sons of Liberty and once as Best Director for Casablanca.
Curtiz was among those who introduced to Hollywood a visual style using artistic lighting, extensive and fluid camera movement, high crane shots, and unusual camera angles. He was versatile, and could handle any film genre: melodrama, comedy, love story, film noir, musical, war story, Western, horror, or historical epic. He always paid attention to the human-interest aspect of every story, stating that the "human and fundamental problems of real people" were the basis of all good drama.
The death of 25 horses in The Charge of the Light Brigade under Curtiz's direction resulted in a near-violent confrontation between Curtiz and star Errol Flynn, which led in turn to the U.S. Congress and the ASPCA enacting legislation and policy to prevent cruelty to animals on the sets of movies.
Curtiz helped popularize the classic swashbuckler, with films such as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), both starring Flynn. He directed many other dramas which are considered classics: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). He directed leading musicals, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943), and White Christmas (1954), and he made comedies, with Life with Father (1947) and We're No Angels (1955).
Early life Curtiz was born Manó Kaminer to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest in 1886, where his father was a carpenter and his mother an opera singer.Biography of Michael Curtiz, Turner Classic Movies (TCM)Tablet Magazine: "The Brothers Who Co-Wrote 'Casablanca', Writers Julius and Philip Epstein, are also forebears of baseball's Theo Epstein" by Adam Chandler August 22, 2013 Several dates and years of birth had been used during his lifetime; in 2017, his biographer Alan K. Rode identified Curtiz's birth certificate, which specifies that he was born at 9 pm on December 25, 1886."Michael Curtiz", Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved January 26, 2026. In 1905, he Magyarised his name to Mihály Kertész. Curtiz had a lower middle class upbringing. He recalled during an interview that his family's home was a cramped apartment, where he had to share a small room with his two brothers and a sister. "Many times, we were hungry," he said.
After graduating from high school, he studied at Markoszy University, followed by the Royal Academy of Theater and Art, in Budapest, before beginning his career.
Career in Europe Actor Curtiz became attracted to the theater when he was a child in Hungary. He built a little theatre in the cellar of his family home when he was 8 years old, where he and five of his friends re-enacted plays. They set up the stage, with scenery and props, and Curtiz directed them.
After he graduated from college at age 19, he took a job as an actor with a traveling theatre company, where he began working as one of their traveling players. From that job, he became a pantomimist with a circus for a while, but then returned to join another group of traveling players for a few more years. They played Ibsen and Shakespeare in various languages, depending on what country they were in. They performed throughout Europe, including France, Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and he eventually learned five languages. He had various responsibilities:
Director He worked as Mihály Kertész at the National Hungarian Theater in 1912.Rosenzweig, Sidney. Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982. and was a member of the Hungarian fencing team at the Olympic Games in Stockholm. Kertész directed Hungary's first feature film, Today and Tomorrow (Ma és holnap, 1912), in which he also had a leading role. He followed that with another film, The Last Bohemian (Az utolsó bohém, also 1912).Vasvári, Louise Olga, ed. Portuges, Caterine. "Curtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood", Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies, Purdue Univ. Press (2011)
Curtiz began living in various cities in Europe to work on silent films in 1913. He first went to study at Nordisk studio in Denmark, which led to work as an actor and assistant director to August Blom on Denmark's first multireel feature film, Atlantis (1913).
After World War I began in 1914, he returned to Hungary, where he served in the army for a year, before he was wounded fighting on the Russian front. Curtiz wrote of that period:
He was assigned to make fund-raising documentaries for the Red Cross in Hungary. In 1917, he was made director of production at Phoenix Films, the leading studio in Budapest, where he remained until he left Hungary. However, none of the films he directed there survive intact, and most are completely lost.
By 1918, he had become one of Hungary's most important directors, having by then directed about 45 films. After the Hungarian Soviet Republic was declared, he continued to work following the ideological guidelines of the new regime. Most notably he directed the short film Jön az öcsém ("My brother is coming home") which has been described as one of the earliest agitprop films. He was also appointed to the "Arts Council", set up to monitor proposed film scripts. At some point before the fall of the short-lived regime, probably in late May or early June 1919, he decided to emigrate to the West.
Curtiz briefly worked at UFA GmbH, a German film company, where he learned to direct large groups of costumed extras, along with using complicated plots, rapid pacing, and romantic themes. His career truly started due to his work for Count Alexander Kolowrat (known as Sascha), with whom he made at least 21 films for the count's film studio, Sascha Films. Curtiz later wrote that at Sascha, he "learned the basic laws of film art, which, in those days, had progressed further in Vienna than anywhere else."
Among the films he directed were Biblical epics such as Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924) (titled Moon of Israel in the U.S.). He also made Red Heels (1925) and The Golden Butterfly (1926), and once directed 14-year-old Greta Garbo in Sweden. During this period, he tended to specialize in directing two kinds of films, either sophisticated light comedies or historical spectaculars. He launched the career of Lucy Doraine, who went on to become an international star, along with that of Lili Damita, who later married Errol Flynn.
The Moon of Israel (1924) was a spectacle of the enslavement of the children of Israel and their miraculous deliverance by way of the Red Sea. Shot in Vienna with a cast of 5,000, it had for its theme the love story of an Israelite maiden and an Egyptian prince. Paramount Pictures in the U.S. bought the rights to the film to compete with Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. However, The Moon of Israel caught the attention of Jack and Harry Warner, and Harry went to Europe in 1926 just to meet Curtiz and watch him work as director.
The Warners were impressed that Curtiz had developed a unique visual style which was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, with high crane shots and unusual camera angles. The film also showed that Curtiz was fond of including romantic melodrama "against events of vast historical importance, for driving his characters to crises and forcing them to make moral decisions," according to Rosenzweig. He offered Curtiz a contract to be a director at his new film studio in Hollywood, Warner Bros., where he would direct a similar epic that had been planned, Noah's Ark (1928).Noah's Ark movie trailer (1928) By the time Curtiz accepted Warner's offer, he was already a prolific director, having made 64 films in countries including Hungary, Austria, and Denmark.Leonard, Suzanne; Tasker, Yvonne, Fifty Hollywood Directors, Routledge (2015)
Career in the United States 1920s Curtiz arrived in the United States in the summer of 1926, and began directing at Warner Bros. under the anglicised name Michael Curtiz. During what became a 28-year period at Warner Bros., he directed 86 films, including his best work.
Although he was an experienced filmmaker, now aged 38, Warners assigned him to direct a number of average-quality films to break him in, the first being The Third Degree (1926). Curtiz's unique camerawork technique was used throughout, visible in dramatic camera angles, in a style which one critic assumed other directors would likely envy.Oakland Tribune, December 19, 1926, p. 58
Learning English quickly was an immediate hurdle, however, since he had no free time. When Jack Warner gave him the film to direct, Curtiz recalls, "I could not speak one word of English." It was a romantic story about jail life and gangsters in Chicago, a place he had never been, about American underworld figures he had never met.The Tennessean (Nashville), April 12, 1962, p. 57
To gain some direct experience about the subject, Curtiz persuaded the Los Angeles sheriff to let him spend a week in jail. "When I came out, I knew what I needed for the picture."Gunson, Victor. "Hard-to-do Films Best Training School for Directors, Declares Michael Curtiz", The Journal News, New York, September 27, 1946
Curtiz firmly believed that investigating the background of every story should be done first and done thoroughly before starting a film. He said that whenever someone asked him how he, a foreigner, could make American films, he told them, "human beings are the same all over the world. Human emotions are international." He treated his first films in the U.S. as learning experiences:
Although the language barrier made communicating with the casts and crews a hardship, he continued to invest time in preparation. Before he directed his first Western, for example, he spent three weeks reading about the histories of Texas and the lives of its important men.Gutterman, Leon. "Our Film Folk", The Wisconsin Chronicle, April 30, 1954, p. 6 He found it necessary to continue such intensive studying of American culture and habits in preparation for most other film genres. But he was quite satisfied being in Hollywood:
The Third Degree (1926), available at the Library of Congress, made good use of Curtiz's experience in using moving cameras to create expressionistic scenes, such as a sequence shot from the perspective of a bullet in motion. The film was the first of eight Curtiz films to have Dolores Costello as its star.
Warner Bros. had Curtiz direct three other mediocre stories to be sure he could take on larger projects, during which time he was able to familiarize himself with their methods and work with the technicians, including cameramen, whom he would use in subsequent productions. As biographer James C. Robertson explains, "In each case, Curtiz strove valiantly, but unsuccessfully to revitalize unconvincing scripts through spectacular camera work and strong central performances, the most noteworthy features of all those films."