Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich (August 9, 1918 - December 5, 1983) was a United States film director, writer and producer.

Robert Burgess Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode Island. The son of a newspaper publisher and part of a very influential family. He was educated at Moses Brown School in Providence and went to the University of Virginia to study economics. He dropped out in 1941 to begin his film industry career with a minor job at RKO.

He quickly worked his way up the production ladder, as an assistant director he worked with men including Jean Renoir, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey and Charlie Chaplin. He moved into television direction in the 1950s and directed his first feature film, Big Leaguer, in 1954. In the 1950s Aldrich was a rare American example of the auteur, enforcing his own vision across a wide thematic range, with films like the noir classsic Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Knife (both 1955) and Attack (1956).

In the 1960s he went on to direct a number of major commercial successes, such as the gothic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), the controversial The Killing of Sister George (1969) and the exemplar for many later war films, The Dirty Dozen (1967). The success of Dozen allowed him to set up his own studio and finance his own films for a few years, but a series of flops returned him to Hollywood and a series of more commercial films. Ulzana's Raid (1972).

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