Walter Wanger, the producer of Cleopatra, attended
Dartmouth, served as a reconnaissance pilot with the Signal Corps
of the US Army in Italy in WWI, was appointed attaché to the
American Peace Mission headed by President Wilson and attended the
Paris Peace Conference. In the early 1920s, Wanger worked at
Paramount Studios where he acquired the novel The Sheik, which was
made into a successful film starring Rudolph Valentino. After a
brief hiatus in England, Wanger returned to Paramount where he was
general manager of production from 1924 to 1931. He was president
of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 1939-1941, for
which he received an Honorary Academy Award in 1946. The producer
of more than 60 motion pictures, including the first outdoor color
film and Queen Christina, Scarlet Street, Stagecoach, Foreign
Correspondent, I Want to Live and The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, he worked with such directors as John Ford, Alfred
Hitchcock, George Cukor, Victor Fleming Fritz Lang and Don Siegel;
and such stars as Ingrid Bergman, the Marx Brothers, Henry Fonda,
Charles Boyer, Cary Grant Claudette Colbert, Frederic March, Susan
Hayward, and Greta Garbo. He married Justine Johnson, a Ziegfield
Girl and later the actress Joan Bennett with whom he had two
daughters. He died in 1968.
Joe Hyams was a Hollywood columnist, former movie editor of
This Week magazine, and Hollywood correspondent for the New York
Herald Tribune. He was the author or co-author of over two dozen
books, many of which are bestselling biographies of Hollywood
stars. He died in 2008.
“Absolutely ravishing reading. . . . To read [My Life with
Cleopatra] . . . was to be absorbed and delighted all over again by
Mr. Wanger's ‘diary,’ with the help of reporter Joe Hyams. One is
struck by Wanger's calm collected intellectual vigor, his defense
of Elizabeth the star, his defense of the talented Joe Mankiewicz
as the final director, and his annoyance, irritation and
disapproval of the then 20th Century Fox executive division.”
—Liz Smith, The Huffington Post
“The story of the movie’s production—which is also the story of how
the budget got so big—is pretty remarkable, and is told remarkably
by its producer, Walter Wanger, in the 1963 book, My Life with
Cleopatra. . . . I’ve written often about the crucial role played
by independent producers, in classic Hollywood and today, in
liberating the best directors from the heavy hand of the studio
system. Wanger was a friend to directors at a time when they needed
all the friends they could get.”
—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
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