Maurice Tourneur was a French film director and screenwriter.
Life Born Maurice Thomas in the Epinettes district
of Paris, France, his father was a wholesaler.
As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator
but was soon drawn to the theater.
In 1904, he married the actress, Fernande Petit.
They had a son, Jacques who would follow his father into the film industry.
Using the stage name Maurice Tourneur, he began his show business career performing
in secondary roles on stage and eventually toured England and South America as part of
the theater company for the great star Gabrielle Réjane.
Drawn to the new art of filmmaking, in 1911 he began working as an assistant director
for the Éclair company.
A quick learner and an innovator, within a short time he was directing films on his own
using major French stars of the day such as Polaire.
In 1914, with the expansion of the giant French film companies into the United States market,
Tourneur moved to New York City to direct silent films for Éclair's American branch
studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey before moving to William A. Brady's World Film Corporation,
where he directed important early American feature-length films such as The Wishing Ring,
Alias Jimmy Valentine, The Cub and Trilby, the last starring Clara Kimball Young and
noted stage actor Wilton Lackaye as Svengali.
Before long, Maurice Tourneur was a major and respected force in American film and a
founding member of the East Coast chapter of the Motion Picture Directors Association.
As the feature film evolved in the mid 1910s, he and his team coupled exceptional technological
skill with unique pictorial and architectural sensibilities in their productions, giving
their films a visual distinctiveness that met with critical acclaim.
Tourneur admired D.W.
Griffith and considered the skill level of American actors at the time ahead of their
counterparts in Europe.
Of the actresses he worked with, he called Mary Pickford the finest screen actress in
the world and believed that stage actress Elsie Ferguson was a brilliant artist.
However, Tourneur opposed the evolving star system that Carl Laemmle had begun with his
advertising campaign for actress Florence Lawrence.
After directing several innovative films for Adolph Zukor's Artcraft Pictures Corporation
in 1917 and 1918, Tourneur launched his own production company with the film Sporting
Life.
In 1921 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
By 1922 he believed that the future of the film industry lay in Hollywood and the following
year he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to go to the West Coast and make a film version
of the Hall Caine novel The Christian.
However, Tourneur's career in the United States faltered in the 1920s as his pictorialism
sometimes hampered the narrative drive of his later films, and he also separated from
his wife Fernande in 1923.
He was removed from production on Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's version of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island
in 1928, and this marked the end of his American career.
After his trouble with MGM, Tourneur decided to move back to his native France.
There, he continued to make films both at home and in Germany, easily making the change
to talkies.
In 1933 he met his second wife, actress Louise Lagrange, while shooting his film, L'Homme
mystérieux.
Tourneur went on to direct another two dozen films, several of which were crime thrillers,
until a 1949 automobile accident in which he was seriously injured and lost a leg.
Health and age prevented him from directing more films, but a voracious reader and a skilled
hobby artist, he kept busy painting and translating detective novels from English into French.
On his passing in 1961, Maurice Tourneur was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in
Paris.
Maurice Tourneur was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6243 Hollywood
Blvd.
His 1917 film, The Poor Little Rich Girl, his 1918 film The Blue Bird and his 1920 film
The Last of the Mohicans have since been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Recently, the American Film Institute's Center for Film and Video Preservation and the National
Archives of Canada have been cooperating on the restoration of Tourneur's 1915 film, The
Cub.
In 2001, a book Maurice Tourneur: The Life and Films was published by author Harry Waldman.
Partial Filmography
Après l'amour Cécile est morte
La Main du diable Volpone
Katia Le Patriote
Koenigsmark Le Voleur
Justin de Marseille L'Homme mystérieux
Les Gaietés de l'escadron In the Name of the Law
Departure Accusée, levez-vous!
Old Loves and New Aloma of the South Seas
Never the Twain Shall Meet The Sporting Life
The White Moth Torment
Jealous Husbands The Isle of Lost Ships
The Christian Les Deux Gosses adaptation of the novel by
Pierre Decourcelle The Brass Bottle
Lorna Doone Foolish Matrons
The Bait The Last of the Mohicans
Deep Waters The White Circle
Treasure Island While Paris Sleeps
The Great Redeemer The County Fair(available for free download
from archive.org) The Broken Butterfly
Victory The Life Line
The White Heather My Lady's Garter
Woman The Sporting Life
A Doll's House Prunella
The Blue Bird Rose of the World
The Rise of Jennie Cushing Barbary Sheep
The Poor Little Rich Girl The Pride of the Clan
The Law of the Land Exile
The Undying Flame The Whip(*Extant; Library of Congress, home
video) A Girl's Folly
The Rail Rider The Velvet Paw
The Closed Road The Hand of Peril
The Pawn of Fate The Butterfly on the Wheel
The Ivory Snuff Box The Cub
Trilby Alias Jimmy Valentine
The Pit (1914 The Wishing Ring
The Man of the Hour Mother
Jean la Poudre References
External links Maurice Tourneur at IMDb.com
Some contemporary interviews with, and articles by, Maurice Tourneur