Casino Royale

Val Guest (11 December 1911 – 10 May 2006) was a British film director, best known for his science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, but who also enjoyed a long, varied and active career in the film industry from the early 1930s up until the early 1980s.

He was born Valmond Maurice Grossmann in London, England, and educated at Seaford College. Guest’s initial career was as an actor, appearing in various productions in London theatres. He also appeared in a few early sound film roles, before he gave up an acting career and moved into writing. For a time in the early 1930s he was the London correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter trade paper, before he began working on film screenplays for Gainsborough Pictures, his first being No Monkey Business in 1935.

He wrote screenplays for the rest of the decade, including working on scripts for Will Hay, as well as some film scores, before in the early 1940s becoming a director, with his debut feature in this role being Miss London Ltd. in 1943. He went on to direct, produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years, with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). He also directed the cult science-fiction films The Abominable Snowman (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) (which won him a BAFTA Award with Wolf Mankowitz for Best Screenplay). He also directed and wrote the screenplay for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). Guest was one of several directors to work on the spoof James Bond film Casino Royale (1967). —wikipedia

The son of actor Walter Huston, American film director John Marcellus Huston was born in Missouri, travelling widely with his family in vaudeville circles, he enjoyed a wild and unconventional youth.

He boxed, rode horses in Mexico and wrote for magazines in New York, before writing dialogue for Hollywood. Before breaking into directing, Huston also spent time acting and street-performing in Paris and London.

His first film, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, was made in 1941, becoming the classic adaptation, and making a star out of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart also appeared in Huston’s next few films: ‘Key Largo’, ‘Across The Pacific’ and ‘The Treasure of The Sierra Madre’.

It was with the latter that Huston won his first Best Director Oscar. His father, Walter, also appeared in the film, winning Best Supporting Actor.

Making military documentaries during World War II, Huston hit the big time again with his 1950 crime film, ‘The Asphalt Jungle’. Following this was ‘The African Queen’, which made Bogart an Oscar-winner.

Huston’s ‘Moulin Rouge’, a biopic of painter Toulouse-Latrec, was a success, winning Best Art Direction and Costume Design Oscars. In 1956, Huston embarked upon an ambitious filming of ‘Moby Dick’, with screenwriter Ray Bradbury, starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab.

Huston now lived in Ireland with his wife, but travelled back to complete the adaptation of Hemmingway’s ‘A Farewell To Arms’, and to direct Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in ‘The Misfits’ – which proved the last roles for both of these folm legends.

Huston directed Montgomery Clift as the title character in ‘Freud’, as well as ‘The List of Adrian Messinger’ and Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Night of The Iguana’.

As an actor, Huston won a Golden Globe for a supporting role in ‘The Cardinal’, and, in 1974, performed opposite Jack Nicholson, in Roman Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’.

His major comeback was in 1985 with ‘Prizzi’s Honor’, starring his daughter Angelica, in an Oscar-winning role. He also directed an adaptation of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in 1987.

Unfortunately, John Huston died later that year, on 28th August, from emphysema. —bio.