Ray, Nicholas

Ray, Nicholas (1911-1979), American film director. Regarded by many critics as the most original Hollywood director of the 1950s, Ray was born in Wisconsin and studied architecture before gravitating towards the performing arts.

After training in theatre and radio under Elia Kazan and John Houseman, Ray made his debut as a film director with the remarkable off-beat thriller They Live by Night (made in 1948, released in 1949). Other equally off-beat films followed, notably In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame and the Western Johnny Guitar (1954), but his greatest success came in 1955 when he coaxed an epoch-making performance out of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

Ray's masterly direction of actors and fluid wide-screen camerawork were again in evidence in Bigger than Life (1956), Bitter Victory (1957), and Party Girl (1958), but he was not considered a suitable big-budget director until Samuel Bronston took him on for the spectacular films King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963). By this time, however, his talent and enthusiasm for Hollywood-type pictures were beginning to wane and he retired from feature-film-making to engage in teaching and experimental work.

Ray's best films were those in which he had full control of his material and could concentrate on his favoured themes of tormented masculinity and the simmering violence below the surface of American life.