Henry Koster: Movies & Box Office

Henry Koster, born Hermann Kosterlitz on May 1, 1905 in Berlin, was a German‑born filmmaker who became one of Hollywood’s most reliable directors of the 1930s‑1960s. He grew up in a Jewish family; his uncle owned a movie theatre where his mother accompanied silent pictures on piano, sparking a lifelong fascination with cinema. After a brief stint as a short‑story writer, Kosterlitz entered the German film industry as a scenarist and assistant to director Curtis Bernhardt, eventually taking over a shoot when Bernhardt fell ill, which launched his directing career. His first directing effort, the comedy Thea Roland (1932), was followed by Das häßliche Mädchen (1933), but the rise of the Nazi regime forced him to flee a country that stripped him of citizenship in 1933. He escaped to France, then Budapest where he married actress Kató Király, and later worked for Universal’s European operations, directing films such as Catherine the Last and The Crosspatch. In 1936 Koster secured a contract with Universal Pictures in Hollywood, arriving without English language skills yet convincing the studio to let him helm Three Smart Girls, launching the career of teenage star Deanna Durbin and rescuing Universal from bankruptcy. Over the next two decades he directed a string of popular musicals, family comedies and epics—including The Bishop’s Wife (1947), Harvey (1950), and the landmark CinemaScope production The Robe (1953), the first Technicolor epic filmed in that format. Koster was known for his gentle storytelling style, his ability to work with stars such as James Stewart, Betty Grable, and Bette Davis, and for repeatedly placing a small sculpted likeness of his wife Peggy Moran in his sets as a personal signature. He retired after The Singing Nun (1966), spent his later years painting portraits of Hollywood colleagues, and died of liver cancer on September 21, 1988 in Camarillo, California.