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Overview

Born
April 3, 1885 · Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died
December 28, 1981 · Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA (heart failure)
Birth name
Joseph Aloysius Dwan
Height
1.71 m

Mini Bio

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Trivia

His extraordinarily long career lasted from 1911-61. During that time he worked under contract at the following studios: Universal (1913-14), Paramount (1917-18, 1923-26), Fox (1926-27, 1929, 1931-32, 1935-40, 1957), United Artists (1944-45), Republic (1949-54) and RKO (1954-55).
He was Gloria Swanson's favorite director. After he began to work for Triangle in 1916, he also won the respect of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were, at that time, the most powerful couple in the film business.
He worked for an illumination company in Chicago, installing Cooper-Hewitt lamps at the Chicago Post Office, opposite the Essanay film studio. Essanay exec George K. Spoor thought the lights could prove useful in movie photography and contracted Dwan to design a bank of lights. Dwan soon graduated to scenario editor. His first directing assignment arrived almost by accident: he was "pressed into service" by the American Film Co. when one of its directors went AWOL on an alcoholic binge.
Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
According to Kevin Brownlow's "The Parade's Gone By", Dwan thought he'd directed over 1400 films, including one-reelers, between his arrival in the industry (circa 1909) and his final film in 1961.

Quotes

If you get your head up above the mob, they try to knock it off. If you stay down, you last forever.
[on Douglas Fairbanks] Stunt men have had to imitate him and it always looked like a stunt when they did it. With him it always looked right.
[on his use of tracking shots throughout his 50-year career] There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation. If a man is being pursued and the pursuers are more interesting than the pursued, I'll track to include them. Things would occur on the set and sometimes ahead of time. They turn you loose on the set.