The Sound of Miles Davis

Emmy Award-winning director Jack Smight was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on March 9, 1925, the offspring of Irish immigrants. After graduating from the unfortunately named Cretin High School, where he was a classmate of Peter Graves, he served in the US Army Air Force during World War Two, where he flew combat missions in the Pacific Theater. After the war he attended the University of Minnesota, where he again met up with Graves—both were matriculating in the theater department as drama students. After graduation they hooked up in Hollywood, where they rented a room and made the rounds, looking for work as actors while Jack worked as a carhop and Peter drove a cab, ignoring the advice of Graves’ older brother, James Arness to head straight back to Minneapolis.

Unlike his friend, Smight did not achieve success as an actor and became a stage manager and then turned to directing. Graves later said of his friend that his acting background helped him understand actors. “He was also a very intelligent, literate man,” Grave said, “who knew how to communicate with the writers.” These skills made him a successful director, first in television and then in the movies. In 1959 he won an Emmy Award for Best Direction of a Single Program of a Dramatic Series – Less Than One Hour for the “Alcoa Theatre” (1957) episode “Eddie”, which starred Mickey Rooney and featured an Emmy-winning script by Ken Hughes. In the 1960s he directed films featuring such A-List talent as Paul Newman and Rod Steiger before moving back to TV in the 1970s, with the occasional feature film directing assignment.

Jack Smight died of cancer on September 1, 2003 in Los Angeles, California. He was 78 years old. —IMDb