Author Description

Renowned for his mastery of light, texture, and pace, Joseph Losey was one of our most innovative and controversial directors--and perhaps our most star-crossed. Blacklisted during the McCarthyite fifties, Losey fled to Britain, where he achieved international acclaim with his 1963 film The Servant, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles. That film marked the beginning of Losey's remarkable collaboration with the playwright Harold Pinter; it was followed by Accident, regarded by many as Losey's finest film, and The Go-Between, awarded the Palm d'Or at Cannes. It appeared that the Hollywood exile would enjoy a long reign as the savior of British cinema. But his gifts ultimately failed him, limited by his bleak vision of life and the battle between the sexes.Ranging from Losey's beginnings with experimental theatre in New York to his death in 1984 at the age of 75, author David Caute provide a compelling portrait of a hugely driven talent, whose creative generosity, alcohol addiction, and often brutal egotism continue to elicit fierce and wildly divergent reactions. Drawing on candid interviews with Losey's associates and members of his casts and crews, Caute sheds important light on Losey's personal life, especially his ambivalent relationship with his mother Ina, a manipulatively flirtatious woman whom Caute believes inspired the lifelong hostility towards women which surfaces unrelentingly in Losey's 31 films, as it did throughout his four marriages and countless affairs. Caute includes a provocative chapter probing Losey's turbulent relationships with his female stars, from Jeanne Moreau to Jane Fonda. Losey emerges as a man whose life and career grew increasingly marred by deep contradictions. On the one hand, Losey was the first director to stage a Bertolt Brecht play in English, and at great personal risk accompanied the German playwright to his appearances before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Nonetheless, the same Losey refused to fly without a