Delbert Mann

Delbert Martin Mann Jr. was born in Lawrence, Kansas, on 30 January 1920, and grew up largely in Nashville, Tennessee. After service as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, he studied at Vanderbilt University and the Yale School of Drama before joining the ranks of directors working in live television drama during its 1950s golden age, directing extensively for NBC's Philco Television Playhouse and Goodyear Television Playhouse. His defining early work was directing the 1953 television broadcast of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, a spare, unglamorous story of a lonely Bronx butcher, for the Philco Playhouse. He then directed the 1955 feature film adaptation with Ernest Borgnine in the lead role, and it became an unexpected sensation, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and earning Mann the Academy Award for Best Director — a rare instance of a filmmaker winning the top directing honor for what was essentially an intimate character study rather than a spectacle. Mann carried the same low-key sensibility into subsequent features, including Separate Tables (1958), the film version of Terence Rattigan's play, and moved fluidly between drama and romantic comedy, directing Lover Come Back (1961) with Doris Day and Rock Hudson before pairing Day with Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink (1962). He continued directing films and extensively for television into the 1980s and served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1967 to 1971. He died in Los Angeles on 11 November 2007, at eighty-seven.