Andrew Marton

Andrew Marton (born Endre Marton on 26 January 1904 in Budapest) was a prolific Hungarian‑American filmmaker whose career spanned four decades and encompassed both directing and second‑unit work on some of Hollywood’s most celebrated epics. After completing high school in 1922 he was taken by Alfréd Deésy to Vienna to join Sascha‑Film, where he quickly progressed from assistant editor to catching the eye of Ernst Lubitsch, who encouraged him to try his luck in Hollywood. Returning to Europe, Marton honed his craft as chief editor for Tobis in Berlin and as an assistant director in Vienna before helming his first feature, Two O'Clock in the Morning, in Britain in 1929. His adventurous spirit led him on a 1934 German expedition to Tibet, producing the documentary‑style Demon of the Himalayas, a project later complicated by his Jewish heritage and political pressures from Nazi authorities. Between the mid‑1930s and the outbreak of World War II he worked with Alexander Korda in London and directed his sole Hungarian‑language film in Budapest, after which he emigrated to the United States where he became a mainstay at MGM. In the 1950s Marton co‑founded a production company with Ivan Tors, Louis Meyer and László Benedek, and he earned lasting fame for directing the iconic chariot race sequence in Ben Hur (1959) as a second‑unit director, as well as contributing to Cleopatra (1963) and The Longest Day (1962). Beyond feature films he produced nature documentaries and supervised television series such as Flipper and Daktari, demonstrating a lifelong fascination with exotic locales, wildlife and visual spectacle. Colleagues like John Landis have cited Marton as a mentor, and his influence persists in the kinetic action set‑pieces that define modern adventure cinema. He died of pneumonia on 7 January 1992 in Santa Monica, leaving a legacy of daring storytelling and technical mastery.