Alexander Korda

Alexander Korda was born László Kellner in the Hungarian village of Pusztatúrpásztó in 1893 and, after early filmmaking in Budapest, Vienna and Berlin, arrived in Hollywood before settling permanently in London in 1930. There he founded London Films and built Denham Studios, effectively creating a modern British film industry where none of any scale had existed. His 1933 production The Private Life of Henry VIII, made on a shoestring and starring Charles Laughton, was the first British film to succeed commercially in America, and it gave Korda the capital and prestige to become the dominant producer in British cinema through the 1930s and 1940s. Korda operated as a producer of taste and ambition rather than a hands-on director after his early career, backing directors including Michael Powell, Carol Reed and William Cameron Menzies, and later producing The Third Man (1949). He was a naturalised British subject and, in 1942, became the first filmmaker to be knighted for services to the industry, a recognition of both his artistic output and his usefulness to British propaganda efforts during the war. His connection to Cary Grant is limited to a single production but a telling one: The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (1936), made in Britain during the period when Grant was manoeuvring out of his Paramount contract and testing the freelance arrangements that would define the rest of his career. Korda's willingness to work with an American star outside the studio system reflected his own outsider's instinct for building institutions where the old rules did not quite apply. Korda died in London in 1956, having survived heart attacks that had troubled him for years. London Films continued after him in diminished form, but the industrial infrastructure he built — Denham, the international co-production model, the willingness to compete directly with Hollywood on its own commercial terms — remained his most durable legacy.