STANLEY KUBRICK Biography - Theater, Opera and Movie personalities

 
 

Biography » theater opera and movie personalities » stanley kubrick

STANLEY KUBRICK

Name: Stanley Kubrick                                                                 
Born: 26 July 1928 New York City, New York, U.S.                                     
Died: 7 March 1999 Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England                                 
                                                                                     
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an influential and acclaimed   
film director and producer considered among the greatest of the 20th century. He     
directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick     
was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow         
method of working, the variety of genres in his movies and his reclusive             
personality about his films and personal life.                                       
                                                                                     
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan,     
the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard Kubrick (1901–1985) and his       
wife Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–1985); his sister, Barbara, was born in 1934.   
Jacques Kubrick, whose parents were of Jewish Austrian origin, was a doctor. At       
Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in         
The Bronx.                                                                           
                                                                                     
Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve; the game remained a life-long       
obsession. When Stanley was thirteen years old, Jacques Kubrick bought him a         
Graflex camera, triggering Kubrick's fascination with still photography. He was       
also interested in jazz, attempting a brief career as a drummer.                     
                                                                                     
Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School 1941–1945. He was a poor           
student with a meager 67 grade average. On graduation from high school in 1945,       
when soldiers returning from the Second World War crowded colleges, his poor         
grades eliminated hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke             
disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that           
nothing about school interested him.                                                 
                                                                                     
In high school, he was chosen official school photographer for a year.               
Eventually, he sought jobs on his own, and by graduation time had sold a             
photographic series to Look magazine in NYC. Kubrick supplemented his income         
playing "chess for quarters" in Washington Square Park and in various Manhattan       
chess clubs. He registered for night school at the City College to improve his       
grade-point average. He worked as a freelance photographer for Look, becoming an     
apprentice photographer in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer.           
                                                                                     
During his Look magazine years, on May 29, 1948, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b.       
1930) and they lived in Greenwich Village, divorcing in 1951. It was then that       
Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and in the     
cinemas of New York City. He was particularly inspired by the complex, fluid         
camera movement of Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual         
style.                                                                               
                                                                                     
Many early-period (1945–1950) photographs by Kubrick were published in the book     
"Drama and Shadows" (2005, Phaidon Press).