Cecil Blount DeMille ( August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959 ) was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films.

DeMille was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts while his parents were vacationing there, and grew up in Washington, North Carolina.

While he is known as DeMille ( his nom d ' oeuvre ), his family name was Dutch and is usually spelled " de Mil ".

His mother was Matilda Beatrice DeMille ( née Samuel ), whose parents were both of German Jewish heritage.

Cecil B. DeMille was known for being an instrumental catalyst for the rising status of many a struggling or unknown actor.

To ensure that Cromwell's character used current slang, DeMille asked Horace Hahn to read the script and comment ( at the time, Hahn was senior class president at Los Angeles High School ).

( DeMille remarked that Mature was " 100 % yellow ").

DeMille was, however, adept at directing " thousands of extras ", and many of his pictures included spectacular set pieces, such as the parting of the Red Sea in both versions of The Ten Commandments, the toppling of the pagan temple in Samson and Delilah, train wrecks in The Road to Yesterday, Union Pacific and The Greatest Show on Earth, and the destruction of a zeppelin in Madame Satan.

DeMille was one of the first directors in Hollywood to become a celebrity in his own right.

Also representative of his penchant for the spectacular was the 1952 production of The Greatest Show on Earth which gave DeMille an Oscar for best picture and a nomination for best director.

In 1949 or 1950, DeMille was recruited by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner to serve on the board of the anti-communist National Committee for a Free Europe, the public face of the organization that oversaw the Radio Free Europe service.

Near the end of his life, DeMille began pre-production work on a film biography of Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement and had asked David Niven to star in the film, which was never made.

Because of illness, he asked his son-in-law, actor Anthony Quinn, to direct a remake of his 1938 film The Buccaneer ; although DeMille served as executive producer, he was unhappy with Quinn's work and tried unsuccessfully to remedy the situation.

Though DeMille was respected by his peers, his individual films were often criticized by them.

In 1955 and 1957, DeMille was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.

Cecil B. DeMille was a leading figure in the increased use of the Insert, and by 1918 he had reached the point of including about 9 Inserts in every 100 shots in The Whispering Chorus.

The first of these was Cecil B. DeMille, whose films, such as The Cheat ( 1915 ), brought out the moral dilemmas facing their characters in a more subtle way than Griffith.

In 2003 at the Golden Globes, Hackman was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for his " outstanding contribution to the entertainment field.

He was next employed as a prop boy and general assistant on an unspecified film directed by Cecil B. DeMille ( Hawks never named the film in later interviews and DeMille made five films roughly in that time period ).

The play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, the then-unknown Cecil B. DeMille, also appeared in the cast.

David Lean also admitted he was deeply indebted to Ingram, and MGM studio chief Dore Schary once listed the top creative people in Hollywood as D. W. Griffith, Ingram, Cecil B. DeMille, and Erich von Stroheim ( in declining order of importance ).

The film was produced, directed, and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Lucille Ball was offered Gloria Grahame's role in the picture by DeMille, but dropped out when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child, Lucie Arnaz.

With his quick wits and the assistance of drunken gunslinger Jim ( Gene Wilder ), also known as " The Waco Kid " (" I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille "), Bart works to overcome the townsfolk's hostile reception.

DeMille also served as producer and / or director for many plays.

DeMille also appeared as himself in Paramount's 1947 all-star musical comedy Variety Girl and he narrated many of his later films, as well as appearing on screen in the introduction to The Ten Commandments.

Moses appears as the central character in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie, also called The Ten Commandments, in which he is portrayed by Charlton Heston.

On the advice of director Cecil B. DeMille, Scott also gained much-needed acting experience by performing in stage plays with the Pasadena Playhouse.

Body builder Steve Reeves was also considered and DeMille lobbied long and hard to get the studio to pick up Reeves, but both DeMille and the studio wanted Reeves to tone down his physique, which Reeves, still young and new to the industry, ultimately refused to do.

The production is directed and choreographed by Marc Robin and also stars Lauren Blackman ( Betty Schaefer ), Curt Dale Clark ( Artie ), David Girolmo ( Max von Mayerling ) and Bill Nabel ( Cecil B. DeMille ).

Furthermore, Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School.

The title of the film ( also the name of Dorff's character ) alludes to legendary director Cecil B. DeMille.

When AFRA ruled those not paying faced suspension from the union, and thus a ban from appearing on the air, DeMille was finished in radio — because he also refused to let anyone else pay the dollar for him.

Films shown in roadshow format before 1953 included silent epics such as The Birth of a Nation ( 1915 ), Intolerance ( 1916 ), The Covered Wagon ( 1923 ), The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1923 ), The Ten Commandments ( 1923 ), Ben-Hur ( 1925 ), The Big Parade ( 1925 ), and other films such as The Phantom of the Opera ( 1925 ), the first Oscar winner Wings ( 1927 ), the very first feature length part-talkie The Jazz Singer ( 1927 ), the silent film Chicago ( 1927 ) ( based on the play that inspired the Kander and Ebb Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film ), Show Boat ( 1929 ) ( a part-talkie based not on the 1927 stage musical but on Edna Ferber's original novel from which the musical was adapted ), The Desert Song ( 1929 ), Rio Rita ( also 1929 ), Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross ( 1932 ), the all-star Oscar winning Grand Hotel ( 1932 ), the Oscar-winning biopic The Great Ziegfeld ( 1936 ), the classic films Lost Horizon ( 1937 ), Gone with the Wind ( 1939 ), Fantasia ( 1940 ), For Whom the Bell Tolls ( 1943 ) and The Song of Bernadette ( 1943 ), the wartime tear-jerker Since You Went Away ( 1944 ), Samuel Goldwyn's Oscar-winning postwar epic The Best Years of Our Lives ( 1946 ), the flamboyant Western Duel in the Sun ( also 1946 ), and the biopic Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman ( 1948 ), as well as some other DeMille epics, such as Samson and Delilah ( 1949 ).

* There are also similarities in the films made by Flanders, and those made in the 1950s by Cecil B. DeMille.

Another cast member, Cecil B. DeMille, also staged the play.

Lasky gave her a starring role in the Civil War drama Held by the Enemy ( 1920 ), and also lobbied for parts for her in several Cecil B. DeMille productions.

Henry Wilcoxon, DeMille's long-time friend, who made frequent appearances in his films, was the actual producer, and DeMille did not receive screen credit, though students of his films would probably say that his touch is obvious throughout the film.

DeMille co-starred with some of the men and women whom he would later direct in films ( i. e. Charlotte Walker, Mary Pickford, and Pedro de Cordoba, among others ).

Gloria Swanson immortalized DeMille with the oft-repeated line, " All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up " in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, wherein DeMille played himself.

A majority of the DeMille motion picture library now resides with EMKA, Ltd. through the television division of NBC Universal, due to Paramount Pictures ' losing the rights to the DeMille films in 1958 to EMKA, so technically it is Universal Pictures that now oversees a vast part of DeMille's motion picture career as well as its related archival material.

The Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable location site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man.

The new company, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, grew quickly, with Lasky and his partners Goldwyn and DeMille running the production side, Hiram Abrams in charge of distribution, and Zukor making great plans.

DeMille, associated with Paramount since 1913, kept making pictures in the grand old style.

Its circle of stars faded in with the announcement: " Paramount Presents – A Cecil B. DeMille Production.

** Anne Bauchens, American film editor worked for 40 years with Cecil B. DeMille ( d. 1967 )

She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong, realistic screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra.

In 1965, Quinn and DeMille were divorced due to his affair with Italian costume designer Jolanda Addolori whom he married in 1966.

In 1970, Crawford was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award by John Wayne at the Golden Globes, which was telecast from the Coconut Grove at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Cecil B. DeMille managed the same thing with his 1956 remake of his silent 1923 film The Ten Commandments.

This resort was followed with others that strived to be the best by creating a country club atmosphere complete with the amenities required to lure the Hollywood celebrities of the time including Cecil B. DeMille, Shirley Temple, and Ginger Rogers.

However, including honorary awards, such as the Henrietta Award – World Film Favorite Actor / Actress or Cecil B. DeMille Award – Barbra Streisand leads with 9 awards.

In 1932, Cecil B. DeMille produced and directed a highly successful film version of The Sign of the Cross, starring Fredric March as centurion Marcus Superbus, Claudette Colbert as Poppea, Charles Laughton as Nero, and Elissa Landi as Mercia, the Christian woman with whom Marcus falls in love.

In 1928 Rand was charged by Cecil B. DeMille with writing a script for what would become the film Skyscraper.