Stanley Kubrick , (born July 26, 1928, Bronx, New York , U.S.—died March 7, 1999, Childwickbury Manor, near St. Albans, Hertfordshire , England), American motion-picture director and writer whose films are characterized by his dramatic visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic or pessimistic perspective. An expatriate, Kubrick was nearly as well known for his reclusive lifestyle in the English countryside as for his painstaking approach to researching, writing, photographing, and editing his infrequent but always much-debated films.

Early life and films

Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, the son of a physician whose interest in chess and photography he began to share at an early age. Bright but bored, Kubrick was a poor student; however, he immersed himself in the role of his high school’s photographer. At age 16 he sold an expressive photo (showing a dejected newspaper vendor surrounded by headlines announcing U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death) to Look magazine. Kubrick aborted his studies at the City College of New York shortly after he had started them so that he could join the staff of Look at age 17, and he then traveled the country as a photojournalist for more than four years. He also became a habitué of the retrospective film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was especially influenced by the work of Orson Welles and Sergey Eisenstein. In 1950 he shot a short documentary about the run-up to a boxing match, which was released by RKO as Day of the Fight (1951). Kubrick left Look, began auditing classes at Columbia University, became a voracious reader, and turned to full-time filmmaking.

Stanley Kubrick: photograph for Look magazine Butcher holding a slab of meat; photograph by Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine, 1949. Stanley Kubrick—Look/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ6-2352)

Stanley Kubrick: photograph for Look magazine Chicago Theatre in downtown Chicago; photograph by Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine, 1949. Stanley Kubrick—Look/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ6-2346)

Stanley Kubrick: photograph for Look magazine Elevated railway in Chicago; photograph by Stanley Kubrick for Look magazine, 1949. Stanley Kubrick—Look/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ6-2348)

After directing a pair of documentaries, he persuaded his father and uncle to help finance the production of his first fiction feature, an ultralow-budget war film, Fear and Desire (1953). Kubrick then scraped together the financing for another low-budget effort, a boxing-related film noir romance, Killer’s Kiss (1955). At this point he joined forces with producer James B. Harris to form Harris-Kubrick Productions. Encouraged by the respectable reviews for Killer’s Kiss, United Artists provided Kubrick with enough money to hire a cast of quality B-film supporting actors—including Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Vince Edwards, and Elisha Cook, Jr.—for his next film. The result was The Killing (1956), a taut caper film about the robbing of a racetrack. It is regarded as an important late-period film noir, largely because of its creative use of flashbacks and its nonlinear narrative.

Virginia Leith and Paul Mazursky in Fear and Desire Paul Mazursky and Virginia Leith in Fear and Desire (1953), directed by Stanley Kubrick. © 1953 Kubrick Family with Joseph Burstyn

Continuing his progression up the Hollywood ladder, Kubrick was given a healthy budget ($850,000) by United Artists to shoot the antiwar drama Paths of Glory (1957) in West Germany. Set during World War I, it focused on the suicidal attack by French troops on a German position and the repercussions in its aftermath. Because of its damning portrayal of the French officer corps, the film was not shown in France until 1975. Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, and Ralph Meeker gave commanding performances. Paths of Glory also featured a fine screenplay by Calder Willingham, cult novelist Jim Thompson, and Kubrick, who nearly always did the lion’s share of the writing on his films’ scripts regardless of his collaborators. Throughout his career, Kubrick took a hands-on approach to the details of all aspects of his films, not least production design, editing, and cinematography. Indeed, he was personally responsible for the bravura handheld tracking shots in Paths of Glory. Unfortunately, Kubrick had waived his salary for profit participation in the film, which, despite its excellence, did not fare well at the box office.

scene from Paths of Glory Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (1957), directed by Stanley Kubrick. © 1957 United Artists Corporation

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Kubrick worked on developing One-Eyed Jacks (1961) for several months with Marlon Brando, but the creative differences between the two finally became too great, and Kubrick left the project, which was ultimately directed by Brando himself. Kubrick then accepted Douglas’s offer to take over the direction of Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann, who had just been fired. Spartacus, the epic recounting of a slave rebellion in the Roman Empire, was more than three hours long—considered overlong by some critics—but most agreed that it was significantly better than the standard “sword-and-sandal” adventure film. It benefited from Dalton Trumbo’s adaptation of a novel by Howard Fast and a distinguished cast that included Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and Charles Laughton. Spartacus was arguably Kubrick’s most-accessible film, but it was also his most-anonymous film and the one over which he had the least control.