Year

Country

Home

People

Films

Articles

Store

The History of American Cinema: 1959

January - June

1/1 -

The MPAA repeals a 1957 ruling that prevented anyone communist sympathisers, or who refused to give evidence before the HUAC, from being nominated for an Academy Award. [ADD]

16/1 -

Former blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo reveals in a TV interview that he is Robert Rich, author of The Brave One, winner of the 1956 Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story. [ADD]

29/1 -

Walt Disney’s animated feature Sleeping Beauty is released. [ADD]

13/2 -

Kirk Douglas, executive producer and star of Spartacus, fires director Anthony Mann from the project.   Mann is replaced by 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick. [ADD]

20/2 -

Singer Eddie Fisher files for divorce from actress Debbie Reynolds after becoming friendly with Elizabeth Taylor, the widow of his former best friend, the late Mike Todd. [ADD]

18/3 -

George Stevens’ adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is released.   Millie Perkins plays the Jewish girl whose family hid in the attic of their home from the invading Nazis during WWII. [ADD]

29/3 -

Elizabeth Taylor converts to Judaism during a ceremony at a Hollywood synagogue. [ADD]

29/3 -

Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot, co-written by regular collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, is released.   Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon star as a pair of hapless musicians forced to dress as women in order to flee gangster George Raft after witnessing a gangland massacre.   Marilyn Monroe also stars as Sugar Kane, the object of Curtis’s affections. [ADD]

4/4 -

Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo is released.   John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson and Ricky Nelson star as a group besieged by villains attempting to spring murderer Claude Akins from the eponymous town’s jail. [ADD]

6/4 -

Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi breaks the record for the number of Oscars awarded to one film set by Gone With the Wind (1939) when it receives nine awards at the 31st Annual Academy Awards ceremony at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood. [MORE]

18/6 -

Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, based on the true story of former nun Marie-Louise Habets, is released by Warners.  Audrey Hepburn stars. [ADD]

The History of Cinema: 1959