Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Literate Skeptic of the Cinema, Dies at 83 (2025)

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer, director and producer who was one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent film makers, died yesterday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 83 and lived in Bedford, N.Y.

Robert Vincent, a friend of the family, said the cause of death was heart failure.

In a two-year period Mr. Mankiewicz won four Academy Awards and other accolades for writing and directing two scintillating high comedies, "A Letter to Three Wives" in 1949 and "All About Eve" in 1950. "A Letter to Three Wives" deals astutely with upper-middle-class manners and morals. "All About Eve," an acerbic dissection of Broadway theater people, also won an Oscar as best movie. In it, Mr. Mankiewicz gave to Bette Davis -- who starred as Margo Channing, an aging actress ferociously defending her theatrical turf against a ruthless ingenue -- a line that entered the Hollywood pantheon of stylish phrases. "Fasten your seat belts," Miss Davis snarled to the guests assembled at a party. "It's going to be a bumpy night." From Pain to Quip

Mr. Mankiewicz was a meticulous craftsman who preferred words to images, who stressed dialogue and reaction to it in a highly theatrical style. Off the set, he was a witty, often ribald raconteur and an urbane ladies' man who habitually transformed painful experiences into cynical quips.

Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times on the eve of a five-week retrospective of Mr. Mankiewicz's movies at the Film Forum in November, praised the "stinging skepticism, the reassuring common sense, the elan and the immense technical virtuosity of his work." Mr. Mankiewicz, according to Mr. Canby, "has always possessed a singular gift for humane, well-rounded, literate dialogue," and his best films had "the scope of novels."

His most memorable films and scenes are elegant and epigrammatic. Describing an arrogant actress in "All About Eve," one of his characters says: "I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. It's about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto."

Mr. Mankiewicz was adept at filming complicated scripts with ensemble casts and many flashbacks, often with monologues and occasionally with multiple narrators expressing conflicting viewpoints. He was a forceful director who enhanced actors' performances by refining their timing and actions and manipulating both their strengths and weaknesses.

Detractors accused him of long-windedness and of overly clarifying plot twists. His later films, reviewers agreed, were overlong, prompting their producers to make damaging cuts. The Nightmare

Mr. Mankiewicz's bete noire was "Cleopatra," a brash attempt to make three works into one: Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" and Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra." When he took over the direction from Rouben Mamoulian in 1961, the project had already surpassed by $1 million its projected $6 million budget, partly because of a series of major illnesses suffered by its star, Elizabeth Taylor, and her record $1 million-plus salary. The off-screen romance between Miss Taylor and her co-star, Richard Burton, added to the studio's difficulties.

Against Mr. Mankiewicz's protests, executives of 20th Century Fox insisted that shooting be resumed even though the script was only half complete. As a result, for many months he directed by day and wrote at night, with a nurse giving him medications around the clock to enable him to maintain the exhausting schedule.

He came to envisage the project as two films totaling 7 1/2 hours, but Darryl F. Zanuck took it away from him and had it chopped to 4 hours. After an unfavorable reception, an additional 22 minutes were deleted, and after the film's first run it was cut to 3 hours, with crucial plot points lost. Mr. Mankiewicz said at the time that the movie on which he had labored so long was being turned into "banjo picks."

"Cleopatra" eventually recouped its final cost of more than $40 million and even made a small profit from television rentals. Mr. Mankiewicz was paid more than $1.5 million for making the movie, but the grim two-year experience seriously depressed him and he made only a few movies after it. He later called it "the toughest three pictures I ever made." It was, he added, "shot in a state of emergency" and "wound up in blind panic." Two-Writer Family

Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was born on Feb. 11, 1909, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the third child of Frank Mankiewicz and the former Johanna Blumenau, both immigrants from Germany. His siblings were a sister, Erna, and a brother, Herman, who became a screenwriter and noted wit and who won an Academy Award for co-writing "Citizen Kane" in 1941.

When Joseph Mankiewicz was 4, the family moved to New York City, where his father taught German and French in public schools and later at City College. Mr. Mankiewicz graduated from Stuyvesant High School and, at the age of 19, from Columbia University, where he had majored in English, won honors and played in many team sports. To earn money, he taught English to foreigners and was a camp counselor.

Mr. Mankiewicz worked in Berlin in 1928, simultaneously in two reportorial jobs and as a translator of silent-film intertitles. The next year, his brother got him a writing contract at Paramount Pictures for $60 a week and he went to Hollywood. He received his first Oscar nomination for co-writing "Skippy" in 1931 and coined the phrase "my little chickadee" for W.C. Fields in the 1932 film "If I Had a Million." He began writing scripts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1933, and became a producer there in 1935. Yearned to Direct

He had some early critical successes as a producer, but "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) with Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant was his first smash hit with the public. Another was "Woman of the Year," (1942), the first film to pair Miss Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

In 1943, he joined Fox and achieved his longtime ambition to direct, with a 1946 Gothic chiller, "Dragonwyck." He gained increasing prestige in 1947 for directing "The Late George Apley," a satire, and "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," a fantasy, and capped his position with his two Oscars for "A Letter to Three Wives." His other films include "Five Fingers," an award-winning 1952 spy caper, and "Julius Caesar" (1953), widely considered one of the best filmings of a Shakespeare play,

His last directorial effort was the 1972 thriller "Sleuth," for which he and the stars, Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, received Oscar nominations.

Mr. Mankiewicz moved his family to Bedford, N.Y., in 1951, saying that children brought up in Hollywood developed distorted values.

He is survived by his third wife, the former Rosemary Matthews, whom he married in 1962; their daughter, Alexandra Mankiewicz of Los Angeles; two sons, Christopher and Thomas Mankiewicz of Los Angeles, by Mr. Mankiewicz's second wife, Rosa Stradner, who died in 1958; as well as a son, Eric Reynal of London, by his first wife, Elizabeth Young, who divorced Mr. Mankiewicz in 1937. He is also survived by a nephew, Frank, a Washington public relations executive and longtime Democratic adviser.

Mr. Mankiewicz did not admire the explicitness of the new Hollywood. In an interview in November with Mel Gussow of The New York Times, he was critical of contemporary films about "the destruction of people and property." Asked to sum up his own film legacy, he replied: "I've lived without caring what anybody thought of me. I followed very few of the rules. I think I've written some good screenplays, gotten some good performances and made some good movies." THE BUMPY RIDE AND OTHER APHORISMS

Joseph L. Mankiewicz was a director with a gift for language, a writer with a directorial eye. Many of his phrases have become classics in the vocabulary of film. These are some of his most celebrated works. AS WRITER

The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu 1929

Skippy 1931

If I Had a Million 1932

Million Dollar Legs 1932

Forsaking All Others 1934

The Keys of the Kingdom (and producer) 1944 AS PRODUCER

Fury 1936

The Bride Wore Red 1937

Three Comrades 1938

Huckleberry Finn 1939

Strange Cargo 1940

The Philadelphia Story 1940

Woman of the Year 1942 AS WRITER AND DIRECTOR

Dragonwyck 1946

Somewhere in the Night 1946

The Late George Apley 1947

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947

Escape 1948

A Letter to Three Wives 1949

All About Eve 1950

The Barefoot Contessa 1954

Guys and Dolls 1955

The Quiet American 1957 (and producer)

The Honey Pot 1967

There Was a Crooked Man 1970 AS DIRECTOR ONLY

House of Strangers 1950

No Way Out 1950

People Will Talk 1951

Five Fingers 1952

Julius Caesar 1953

Suddenly, Last Summer 1959

Cleopatra 1963

Sleuth 1972

Photos: Joseph L. Mankiewicz (The New York Times, 1986); Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in the 1950 film "All About Eve," which Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote. (20th Century Fox)

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Literate Skeptic of the Cinema, Dies at 83 (2025)
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