The truth about Otto Preminger, the most merciless tyrant in Hollywood

The greatest films of Otto Preminger stand as peaks for a certain kind of intellectually probing Hollywood entertainment. This prolific, intimidating and culturally voracious producer-director achieved auteur status not, like Hitchcock, through a mastery of suspense – indeed, Preminger’s fêted noir Laura (1944) unfolds instead with a dreamlike sense of mystery. 

Over time, he carved a niche for his picking apart of institutions and refusal to duck controversial themes. He was famous for putting his characters on trial – literally, in the case of his courtroom classic Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and the Senate floor intrigue of Advise and Consent (1962). His hard-hitting study of drug dependency starring Frank Sinatra, The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), combined characteristic directorial flair with blazing a trail in its content. Indeed, Preminger often pushed back against the forces of censorship in America – on issues as taboo-breaking for their time as drug addiction, homosexuality, promiscuity and rape. 

However, he has also been subject to reputational damage. Preminger – born into an Austrian Jewish family in 1905, and a resident in Hollywood from the 1930s – could be a frightening bully in exacting what he wanted on film sets. His behaviour towards numerous unfortunate actors, and plenty of other collaborators, too, exposed an undeniably ugly side to his personality.

Very few of Preminger’s sets were exactly harmonious. Unskilled actors could be chewed up in front of their co-stars and left in tears; even veterans had to come up with strategies to stand their ground. During the London shoot of his eerie child-abduction thriller Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), he left Carol Lynley “sobbing uncontrollably”, according to one visiting journalist, and sarcastically mocked the talents of Keir Dullea, who had just won a Golden Globe as the most promising new actor of 1963.

Even Laurence Olivier, who played the comparatively menial part of the chief inspector, felt that the “little man” he was playing had been “bullied onto [him]” by Preminger, whom he came away disliking quite intensely, calling him a “heavy-handed egotist” in his book On Acting. According to Dullea, though, Olivier did step in with at least one priceless rejoinder during a spat involving his scene partners. “Otto, dear boy, I really wish you wouldn’t scream at the children.”

Preminger was just as famous for his talent searches as he was infamous for the fuming frustration and psychological scarring that could then ensue. A case in point was Jean Seberg, whom he plucked from total obscurity at 19 to play Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957), choosing her from some 18,000 hopefuls. Cast in a frenzy of publicity, she would have an awful experience from which Preminger did little to protect her.

Seeing him first as a “father” and “saviour”, Seberg let him install her in the Dorchester hotel, where he was also staying, to take charge of every element of her preparation. There were rumours of an affair – though Seberg’s biographer says she was always puzzled by these.

According to the film’s editor, Helga Cranston – who, after Seberg’s critical mauling as Joan, would witness her second chance on the following year’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958) – Preminger had a different form of subjugation in mind. “He really made her miserable in order to perform miserably. It was as simple and cruel as that.” Richard Widmark, who played Charles VII, described witnessing her treatment as the worst experience of his career. “It was sadism.”

In the very last week of filming Saint Joan, an exhausted Seberg was engulfed in flames when one of the gas cylinders misfired underneath Joan’s pyre, leaving her with permanent scars on her torso. While this horrible accident couldn’t be blamed on Preminger personally, the resumption of hostilities on the French Riviera, come Tristesse, certainly could.

Per co-star Mylène Demongeot, Preminger was “always apoplectic and crimson… He is absolutely hellish with her.” David Niven kept his temper, while he and Deborah Kerr tried to support Seberg as best they could.

Tom Tryon, the novice actor Preminger chose to play an ambitious Catholic priest in The Cardinal (1963), had – by most accounts – an even rougher time than Seberg. “He was a tyrant who ruled by terror. He tied me up in knots,” Tryon would later say, having given up acting altogether to become a successful thriller writer – a career shift for which Preminger outrageously gave himself the credit.

Yet there were contradictions to Preminger’s personality, which are explored explicitly in Chris Fujiwara’s book The World and its Double. Fujiwara balances not only scholarly insights on the films (and performances) that Preminger’s ferocious work ethic yielded, but redemptive testimonies from many who loved him and his manner of directing. “He was very powerful and very gentle, no matter what anyone said,” according to Paula Prentiss 
(In Harm’s Way). Walter Newman, the screenwriter of The Man with the Golden Arm, called him “endlessly patient, always courteous”.

Demongeot, who certainly wasn’t spared the director’s tongue-lashings, actually liked him in spite of everything. “He was a very intelligent man, a fascinating storyteller with his thick Viennese accent, and he could even be charming, and very funny, outside of work.”

Robert Mitchum saw both sides on the set of Angel Face (1952). After repeated takes of being made to slap Jean Simmons until her cheeks were raw, Mitchum snapped, and instead slapped Preminger, who quickly agreed to print the last take. Mitchum thought Preminger “a very gifted producer, with great taste”– indeed, a better producer than he was a director – and also “one of the funniest men I know”. Joan Crawford, who starred for him in Daisy Kenyon (1947), called him “a dear man – sort of a Jewish Nazi, but I love him”.

Dana Andrews, who worked with him five times and gave arguably his best performances for Preminger, acknowledged that he gave some actors a very hard time. “He doesn’t have much patience with inefficiency.” With huge male stars – Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, John Wayne – he also tended to back off. Anyone who stood their ground with him, nose to nose, earned his respect, while the merest hint of weakness or prevarication would cause him to pounce.

Perhaps the most plausible critique of Preminger comes from Laurence Luckinbill, who had a role in one of the director’s last films, the poorly received comedy-drama Such Good Friends (1971). “I don’t think he casts well. He traps himself. Then he is forced to tell everybody what he expects of them to the smallest detail.”

Preminger’s style of irascible perfectionism is certainly out of bounds these days. But his films, as Fujiwara’s book understands, had a complex vision to put across, and no one was ever in any doubt that it was clear in his head. From a certain standpoint – and even if he often crossed the line unforgivably from autocrat to tyrant – his bullying was a tool. Would his masterpieces be quite so great if he’d held back?

The World and its Double: the Life and Work of Otto Preminger by Chris Fujiwara is out now (Faber, £20)