John Huston

John Marcellus Huston, born August 5, 1906, in Nevada, Missouri, and who died August 28, 1987, in Middletown, Rhode Island, was an American and Irish filmmaker and actor whose career spanned five decades. The son of actor Walter Huston, he trained as a fine art painter in Paris before moving to Mexico to write plays and short stories, then relocated to Los Angeles to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, earning early Academy Award nominations for films directed by William Dieterle and Howard Hawks. His 1941 directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, succeeded critically and commercially despite its modest budget, launching a long directing career across 37 feature films for which he also frequently wrote the screenplay, earning two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA Fellowship.