Daniel Mann

Daniel Mann (born August 8, 1912, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died November 21, 1991, Los Angeles, California) was an American director who was best known for his film adaptations of plays, several of which he also staged on Broadway.

After attending New York’s Professional Children’s School, Mann studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. He later directed theatre productions, and in 1950 he staged his first Broadway play, William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. The following year he oversaw a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. Both were successes and helped Mann launch a film career in Hollywood.

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Mann’s first movie was an adaptation of Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Shirley Booth reprised her stage role as the desperately unhappy wife of an alcoholic (played by Burt Lancaster). Booth won the Academy Award for best actress, and Terry Moore was also nominated for best supporting actress. Booth returned for the tearjerker About Mrs. Leslie (1954), playing the lover of a tycoon (Robert Ryan). In 1955 Mann helmed The Rose Tattoo, with a screenplay by Williams. It featured Italian actress Anna Magnani, in her Hollywood debut, as a grieving widow; Lancaster was the truck driver who revives her passion. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and Magnani and cinematographer James Wong Howe, among others, won Oscars.

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Mann’s success continued with I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), an effective drama based on the autobiography of troubled singer Lillian Roth, whose career was nearly destroyed by alcoholism and a series of bad marriages. Susan Hayward received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Roth. The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) was an acclaimed adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by John Patrick, who also wrote the screenplay. The film, which offered a comedic look at clashing cultures, starred Marlon Brando as the resourceful Japanese translator Sakini, who works with U.S. troops during their occupation of Okinawa following World War II, and Glenn Ford played a U.S. officer.

To this point Mann had been successfully transferring Broadway hits to the screen, but, as he moved away from that source, the quality of his work declined. Hot Spell (1958) was a turgid soap opera, with Booth, Shirley MacLaine, and Anthony Quinn, and The Last Angry Man (1959) was an intermittently effective version of a Gerald Green novel, starring Paul Muni and David Wayne.

Mann then helmed Butterfield 8 (1960), which won Elizabeth Taylor her first Academy Award, for her portrayal of a New York call girl. Despite her performance, the melodrama, a bowdlerized version of the John O’Hara novel, was widely dismissed by critics. It was a box-office success, however, partly because of the scandal surrounding Taylor’s marriage to Eddie Fisher, who had a supporting role in the film.

Mann reteamed with Hayward on Ada (1961), in which the actress played a former prostitute who marries a state governor (Dean Martin) and helps him fend off political rivals. The film was largely ignored, as was the melodrama Five Finger Exercise (1962), a flawed adaptation of the hit play by Peter Shaffer. Who’s Got the Action? (1962) and Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963) were uninspired comic vehicles for Martin.

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In 1966 Mann found critical and commercial success with Our Man Flint, a parody of the James Bond pictures, with James Coburn as the suavest of superspies. For Love of Ivy (1968) was notable for being a romantic comedy about two African American characters (Sidney Poitier and Abbey Lincoln). In A Dream of Kings (1969), Quinn and Irene Papas were well cast as Greek immigrants trying to return to the old country. In 1971 Mann had a surprise hit with Willard, a horror film about a lonely young man who befriends rats and then trains them to kill.

After a string of flops, Mann directed (with Burt Kennedy) the acclaimed television miniseries How the West Was Won, an epic about a family moving to Oregon in the 1860s. More praise followed for the TV movie Playing for Time (1980; codirected with Joseph Sargent), a drama based on the life of Fania Fénelon, a musician at Auschwitz who survived the horrors of the camp by performing in a female orchestra. Vanessa Redgrave won an Emmy Award for her nuanced performance as Fénelon, as did Jane Alexander for her portrayal of another musician; screenwriter Arthur Miller and the production itself also received Emmys. Mann made two more television films before retiring in 1987.