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.

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.

DeMille was also in closer touch with the reality of contemporary American life.

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.

DeMille married Constance Adams on August 16, 1902 and had one child, Cecilia.

Sir Thomas Sean Connery ( born 25 August 1930 ) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards ( one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award ) and three Golden Globes ( including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award ).

Senator Joseph McCarthy was pursuing Communists at the time, and Cecil B. DeMille was one of his supporters ; another Best Picture nominee, High Noon, was produced by Carl Foreman, who would soon be on the Hollywood blacklist.

In 1995 she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievements, one of many such awards.

Anthony Quinn and his wife Katherine DeMille ( daughter of Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille ) were visiting Fields one afternoon when the Quinns ' two-year-old son, Christopher, drowned in Fields ’ s lily pond.

The Mayerling character states that he used to be one of the three great directors of the silent era, along with D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille ; many film critics agree that Stroheim was indeed one of the great early directors.

The gold spike used in the 1939 Cecil B. DeMille movie, Union Pacific depicting the event, was the same one used in 1869, on loan to DeMille by its curator, Stanford University.

Samson and Delilah is a 1949 film made by Paramount Pictures ( and one of few pre-1950 films by the studio to remain under its ownership ), produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr as the title characters.

The role is uncredited, but the list of other uncredited performers in that film include Herb Alpert as a Hebrew drummer, Michael Ansara as an Egyptian taskmaster, Robert Vaughn as a Hebrew spearman, Clint Walker as a Sardinian captain, Eduard Franz as Jethro, Mary Lou Cotterman as Ishara, one of Jethros ' daughters, and DeMille himself as the film's narrator.

* Plum Island is a novel by Long Island author Nelson DeMille, who uses the island as one of his settings in the book.

In his 1959 autobiography, DeMille alleged that a former member of the American Communist Party later confided to him that the party had consciously orchestrated these circumstances of his exclusion from radio, as they considered him to be one of their two foremost enemies in radio.

Goudal appeared in several highly successful and acclaimed films for DeMille and became one of the top box office draws of the late 1920s.

She often starred in vehicles by Cecil B. DeMille and Marshall Neilan, and she was recognised by leading film critics of the time to be one of the foremost actresses of the entire silent era.

DeMille first used three-strip Technicolor in Northwest Mounted Police ( 1940 ).

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.

His first wife was the adopted daughter of Cecil B. DeMille, the actress Katherine DeMille, whom he married in 1937.

Recognizing its subject as an international figure within the entertainment industry, the first award was presented to director and producer, Cecil B. DeMille.

Cecil B. DeMille was the first who wanted to hire him, telling his partner, Jesse Lasky, " The boy is a genius.

Cecil B. DeMille, director of epic movies like The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings, was the first director to use a megaphone during production.

In December of that year, Cecil B. DeMille, in association with Jesse Lasky, leased the barn and studio facilities for $ 250. 00 a month establishing the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and began production of The Squaw Man ( 1914 ), the first feature film to be produced in the Hollywood area.

Bess Flowers was first married on September 2, 1923, in Ventura County, California, to Cullen Tate ( 1894 – 1947 ), an assistant to Cecil B. DeMille.

Following his appearance in the critically praised but unsuccessful Maxwell Anderson-Harold Hickerson drama about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Gods of the Lightning ( Bickford was the Sacco character ), Bickford was contacted by filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille and offered a contract with MGM studios to star in DeMille's first talking picture, Dynamite.

Taylor is possibly best recalled for her roles in the 1922 drama Monte Cristo, opposite John Gilbert ; the enormously successful 1923 Cecil B. DeMille directed The Ten Commandments as Miriam, the sister of Moses ; as Lucrezia Borgia in the 1926 Warner Bros .' first feature-length film with synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and musical soundtrack Don Juan, with John Barrymore, Mary Astor and Warner Oland ; 1927's New York, featuring Ricardo Cortez and Lois Wilson ; 1931's Street Scene with Sylvia Sidney ; the Academy Award-winning Cimarron ; and the Clara Bow talkie Call Her Savage in 1932.

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 ).

It was first presented on February 21, 1952 at the 9th Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony and is named in honor of its first recipient, director Cecil B. DeMille.

They appeared on screen with Carmen Miranda and Groucho Marx in the 1947 film Copacabana, the same year that they joined Bob Hope and Cecil B. DeMille on the live premiere broadcast special launching KTLA in Los Angeles, the very first telecast west of the Mississippi.