Jules Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008), born Julius Dassin, was an American film director. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.
One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete...
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Jules Dassin (December 18, 1911 – March 31, 2008), born Julius Dassin, was an American film director. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career.
One of eight children of a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death.
Dassin quickly became better known for his noir films Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves' Highway in the 1940s, which helped him to become "one of the leading American filmmakers of the postwar era."
Dassin's most influential film was the heist movie Rififi, which inspired a genre of movies including Ocean's Eleven and Mission: Impossible.
Jules Dassin was married to:
He was considered a major Philhellene to the point of Greek officials describing him as a "first generation Greek". Along with his last...
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