Henry King Overview:

Director, Henry King, was born on Jan 24, 1886 in Christiansburg, VA. His best known films include Twelve O'Clock High, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Song of Bernadette, Stella Dallas (1925), The Winning of Barbara Worth, In Old Chicago, Jesse James, Alexander's Ragtime Band, The Black Swan, Captain from Castile, A Bell for Adanom Prince of Foxes, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. King died at the age of 96 on Jun 29, 1982 in Toluca Lake, CA and was laid to rest in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, CA.

MINI BIO:

Henry King has probably given as much pleasure to people in the cinema as any other American director. That he did not win an Academy Award (only two nominations) was one of Hollywood's deeper miscalculations. Although his films do show a falling-away in the 1950s, the previous 30 years are studded with high achievement. There were times when he was swamped by grandeur, pomp or literariness, pitfalls into which he seemed doomed periodically to fall, but when he returned to Ameicana, the simple rural qualities of America in times past, he was well-nigh unbeatable.

(Source: available at Amazon Quinlan's Film Directors).

HONORS and AWARDS:

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Although King was nominated for two Oscars, he never won a competitive Academy Award.

Academy Awards

YearAwardFilm nameRoleResult
1943Best DirectorThe Song of Bernadette (1943)N/ANominated
1944Best DirectorWilson (1944)N/ANominated
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He was honored with one star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the category of Motion Pictures.

BlogHub Articles:

Stanley and Livingstone (1939, )

on Aug 26, 2008 From The Stop Button

There are some beautiful sequences in Stanley and Livingstone, unfortunately, they’re mostly the second unit work from Africa. These sequences–the endless line of men trekking across great expanses–reveal the landscape and wild life of the continent with fervor. Later on, they̵... Read full article


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Henry King Facts
Henry King was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars every year.

King and his brother, director Louis King, both worked at 20th Century-Fox at the same time in the 1940s. While Henry got large-scale, "important" pictures, Louis was usually given lower-budget outdoors pictures, mysteries or westerns. Henry's "prestige" picture, Wilson (1944), was a very expensive flop, though, while Louis' low-budget outdoors picture Smoky (1946) was one of Fox's biggest moneymakers that year. Shotly after "Smoky" was released, Henry stopped Louis on the lot one day and said, "I've just come from the accounting office and seen the figures. 'Smoky' has now earned what we lost on 'Wilson' ".

He was the first owner of a Waco SRE Aristrocrat cabin biplane that was completed on July 2, 1940. The base price was $17,800, making it among the most expensive private aircraft of its time; only 29 SRE's and similar ARE's and HRE's were built before World War II ended production in 1942. An avid pilot, King scouted for shooting locations from the air and was a founder of the Civil Air Patrol during World War II and he undoubtedly used the SRE for those tasks. King's SRE was later owned by Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc., and a May 1954 photograph of it while owned by Fairchild appears on page 102 of the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society.

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