Austrians in Hollywood - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2009 - 55 Euro Cent

Fred Zinnemann was born on April 29, 1907 in Vienna. Already in his youth he was a close friend of Billy Wilder, who later became a famous Hollywood director like himself. After graduating in 1925 Zinnemann began to study law before he completed a camera training at the Paris "Ecole Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie" two years later. After a stay in Berlin, where he worked as a camera assistant and worked with, inter alia, Marlene Dietrich, he went to Hollywood in October 1929. Here he was first assistant to Berthold Viertel, to then be entrusted with first directorial work on documentary films. In 1937 he came to the well-known production company "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer", where he received his first Oscar for the short film "That Mothers Might Live". Only then did Fred Zinnemann turn to the feature film. Over the next four decades, he directed film classics such as "Die Gezeichneten", "High Noon", "Damn For All Eternity", "History of a Nun" and "The Jackal" - and there was hardly a screen size, with Zinnemann did not work over time. Hollywood legends such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger, Grace Kelly or Meryl Streep owe their jump to the world-famous career. Fred Zinnemann has been honored five times by the Academy with an Oscar and another six times he was nominated for an Oscar. The film "High Noon" Zinnemann earned the award for the best director of the year 1951 awarded by the New York film criticism. At the age of 89, Fred Zinnemann died of a heart attack in London, but his films have made him immortalized forever.