| Robert Aldrich (August 9, 1918 -
December 5, 1983) was a United States film
director, writer and producer notable
for a number of films including What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and The Dirty Dozen.
Robert Burgess Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode
Island, the son of Lora Lawson
and newspaper publisher Edward B. Aldrich, and grandson of US Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. Robert was educated at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island and went to the University of Virginia to study economics. He
dropped out in 1941 to begin his film industry career with a minor job at RKO.
He quickly worked his way up the production ladder, as an assistant director he worked with men including Jean Renoir, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey and
Charlie Chaplin. He moved into television direction in the 1950s and
directed his first feature film, The Big Leaguer, in 1954. In the 1950s Aldrich was a rare American example of the auteur, enforcing his own vision across a wide thematic range, with films like the noir classsic Kiss Me
Deadly, the adaptation of Clifford Odets' play about Hollywood The Big Knife (both 1955) and the
war film Attack! (1956).
In the 1960s he went on to direct a number of major commercial successes, such as the gothic What Ever Happened to Baby
Jane? (1962), the controversial The Killing of Sister George (1969) and the exemplar for many later war films, The Dirty Dozen (1967). The success of Dozen allowed him to set up
his own studio and finance his own films for a few years, but a series of flops returned him to Hollywood and a series of more
commercial films, such as The Longest Yard (1974). His
stunning Western from 1972 Ulzana's Raid is among the very best
of his works.
He had four children with his first wife Harriet Foster, all of whom became involved in the movie business: Adell Aldrich, William Aldrich, Alida Aldrich, and Kelly Aldrich. Robert and Harriet later divorced, and he married model Sybille Siegfried in 1965.
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