Preston Sturges Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Preston Sturges was born in 1898 in Chicago and came of age in a household that prized art, travel, and entrepreneurial daring. His mother, Mary Desti, a cosmetics entrepreneur and confidante of the dancer Isadora Duncan, took him back and forth between the United States and Europe, exposing him to theaters, salons, and ateliers in Paris and other capitals. When Mary later married Chicago businessman Solomon Sturges, the boy took his stepfather's surname, a link to stability that balanced the bohemian swirl around his mother. The contrast between his mother's flamboyant circle and his stepfather's pragmatic world would echo in his lifelong fascination with both dreamers and operators.

Early Ventures and Playwriting
As a young man, Sturges worked in his mother's cosmetics business and helped develop a much-publicized "kiss-proof" lipstick, an early hint of his knack for problem-solving and promotion. But it was the stage that truly called to him. In the late 1920s he emerged as a Broadway playwright of wit and confidence, with "Strictly Dishonorable" (1929) becoming a smash. Its brisk, irreverent take on romance and propriety announced a writer with a gift for barbed dialogue and heart, and Hollywood took notice.

Hollywood Screenwriter
Relocating to film, Sturges quickly distinguished himself with scripts of structural ingenuity and emotional bite. "The Power and the Glory" (1933), directed by William K. Howard and starring Spencer Tracy, used an audacious flashback architecture that critics later linked to narrative experiments in "Citizen Kane". Over the next years he wrote for a range of directors, including William Wyler and Mitchell Leisen. His screenplays for Leisen, notably "Easy Living" (1937) and "Remember the Night" (1940), were acclaimed, yet the experience sharpened Sturges's conviction that only by directing could he protect the rhythm, tone, and character logic he prized.

Writer-Director Breakthrough
At Paramount he proposed a bold bargain: he would sell "The Great McGinty" (1940) to the studio for a token fee if he could direct it himself. The resulting satire of American machine politics won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and established him as one of the first major writer-directors of the studio era. He followed with "Christmas in July" (1940), then a peerless string of comedies: "The Lady Eve" (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda; "Sullivan's Travels" (1941) with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake; and "The Palm Beach Story" (1942) with Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea. These films combined farce with social x-ray, featuring con artists, heiresses, idealists, and hustlers colliding in a uniquely American carnival.

Peak Years and a Stock Company
Sturges built a remarkable stock company of character players, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Robert Greig, and others, who could deliver his rapid-fire dialogue and hairpin turns from slapstick to sincerity. He pushed boundaries with "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" (1944), where Betty Hutton's exuberant performance and Eddie Bracken's hapless decency framed a subversive, tender look at small-town morality. "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944), also led by Bracken, skewered hero worship while honoring ordinary courage. During this period, Sturges battled studio caution and the Production Code, yet his films' inventiveness and heart made them enduring.

Clashes, Recuts, and Transition
Paramount's recutting of "The Great Moment", his offbeat tribute to the pioneer of anesthesia, demoralized him and eroded his power at the studio. Seeking independence, Sturges allied with Howard Hughes and wrote and directed "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" (1947) for Harold Lloyd. The film was reworked and retitled, fraying relationships and momentum. At 20th Century Fox he mounted the darkly sparkling "Unfaithfully Yours" (1948) with Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell, a virtuoso blend of fantasy and jealousy that critics admired but audiences initially resisted. "The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend" (1949) with Betty Grable fared poorly, signaling a difficult new phase.

Later Work and European Forays
In the 1950s Sturges sought fresh starts, including work in Europe. He wrote and directed "The French, They Are a Funny Race" (1955), a culture-clash comedy that let him play with national types and linguistic nuance. Though he never again matched his early-1940s run, he remained ceaselessly inventive, drafting projects, revising scripts, and shaping memoirs that reflected on the studio battles, happy accidents, and artistic convictions that had defined his career.

Methods, Themes, and Collaborators
Sturges's method relied on velocity, precision, and musicality: lines overlap, gags crescendo, and sudden reversals yield to an unexpected tenderness. He wrote bravura roles for stars, Stanwyck's con-artist with a conscience, Fonda's trusting heir, McCrea's earnest dreamer, Lake's shimmering pragmatist, and surrounded them with character actors who enriched the comic ecology. He maintained friendships and creative bonds with performers and craftspeople who could calibrate his tone, from editors who preserved timing to designers who made elegance and chaos live on the same set.

Legacy
By the time of his death in 1959, Sturges's reputation had been buffeted by studio conflicts and changing tastes, yet his best films endured. Later critics and filmmakers saw in his work a blueprint for modern American screen comedy: satire that loves its fools, speed that never outruns feeling, and dialogue that crackles without losing humanity. The title at the heart of "Sullivan's Travels", "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", would be borrowed decades later, a tribute to his influence and a reminder that his blend of brains, heart, and audacity remained a touchstone.

Final Years
Sturges died in New York in 1959. He left behind films that continue to feel startlingly fresh, the imprint of a writer-director who believed that laughter could be both a scalpel and a lifeline, and a gallery of collaborators, from Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea to Veronica Lake, Eddie Bracken, Harold Lloyd, and Rex Harrison, who helped give his wit its enduring face.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Preston, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Movie - Moving On.