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Delbert Mann

This article is more than 16 years old
Hollywood director who won an Oscar for Marty, a love story about loneliness

Marty (1955), directed by Delbert Mann, who has died aged 87, was one of the most celebrated examples of what is known in show- business as a "sleeper", a film ostensibly lacking strong mass audience appeal but which, contrary to everyone's dire predictions, is financially successful. Although this gentle, intimate study of the mundane had no stars, it kept the box offices busy and won four Academy awards: best picture; best screenplay (Paddy Chayevsky); best actor (untypically cast movie heavy Ernest Borgnine); and best director, making Mann the first director ever to win an Oscar for a first feature film (a feat unequalled until Robert Redford won it for Ordinary People, 25 years later). It also won the Golden Palm at Cannes.

Marty, a simple love story which told of how plain 34-year-old Bronx butcher Marty (Borgnine) meets a plain schoolteacher (Betsy Blair, Oscar-nominated) at a Saturday night dance, and are drawn together by their fears of rejection and loneliness, started a vogue for small-scale, cheaply made dramas about ordinary people.

Shot in less than three weeks, it was one of the first films in the mid-1950s to bring new naturalism, new life and new talent to Hollywood from television. Mann was one of the best-known graduates of the golden age of television, when mostly original plays were broadcast live. He directed plays for the NBC TV Playhouse series from 1949 to 1955, some of them written by Chayevsky.

Mann was born in the town of Lawrence, Kansas, but the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where his father, a sociology professor, took up a teaching position. After graduating in political science from Vanderbilt University, Mann joined the US air corps, eventually becoming a B-24 bomber pilot, flying 35 combat missions in Europe. On being demobbed, he attended the Yale drama school, and then directed a few plays until an old friend from college days, Fred Coe, now a producer at NBC, offered him the job of directing live television drama.

Among Mann's successes were Robert E Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda); a musical version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (with Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and Frank Sinatra) and three plays by Chayevsky: Marty (with Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand); The Bachelor Party (with Eddie Albert) and The Middle of the Night (with Eva Marie Saint and EG Marshall). All three of the Chayevsky plays were adapted successfully for the big screen and directed by Mann. But when serious drama was being drained from American television, both Mann and Chayevsky were persuaded to enter the movies at the instigation of independent production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster (the last named being Burt), which agreed to finance Marty on the minuscule budget of $343,000, solely as a tax loss. However, when it became clear that, far from their writing it off financially, Marty was destined to make them a healthy profit, they spent more on advertising and promotion than the shooting itself had cost.

The same producer, director and writing team followed it up with the equally good The Bachelor Party (1957). Set in a cheerless New York, it followed the attempts of five office workers to enjoy the last night of bachelorhood of one of their number. But instead of having a good time, they find their problems are highlighted: the underlined message of the film was that marriage can be depressing, but it is better than being miserable alone.

Middle of the Night (1959) continued to show that little people had real emotions, in this case, a lonely middle-aged widower (Fredric March) who becomes infatuated with a secretary (Kim Novak) at his clothing factory. The year before, Mann directed two rather flat adaptations from stage plays, Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms - shot on an artificial sound stage at Paramount, but allowing its three stars, Sophia Loren, Burl Ives and Tony Perkins, to shine through the murky atmosphere - and Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables. The latter boasted an Oscar-winning performance from David Niven as a bogus major. Another play, William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), which dealt with sexual awakening, family discord, class snobbery and antisemitism, got Mann's rather overwrought film treatment.

Then, after years of depicting drab lives, Mann felt he had earned the right to move into the world of fluffy Doris Day romantic comedies, such as Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962), co-starring Rock Hudson and Cary Grant respectively. Hudson also starred in A Gathering of Eagles (1963), a cold war military drama made to please the rightwing head of the American air force, General Curtis LeMay, who wanted a patriotic air force film to counter Stanley Kubrick's satire Dr Strangelove.

In the late 1960s Mann returned to work mostly on television. "I missed the excitement and concentration that live TV gave us in the old days. I was able to achieve the artistic freedom I can't get in films," he commented. But the days of live television were long over, and Mann concentrated on a series of stolid all-star productions shot on film. These included David Copperfield (with Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Edith Evans, Wendy Hiller and Ralph Richardson), Jane Eyre (with George C Scott and Susannah York) and Kidnapped (with Michael Caine and Trevor Howard).

There were also several patriotic dramas, balanced by a respectable remake of All Quiet on the Western Front (1979), with Mann boldly facing comparisons with the classic 1930 Lewis Milestone version. Mann, who declared, "I am not a great believer in the so-called auteur theory of film-making," saw himself more as a craftsman, paying close attention to narrative, realism, balance and continuity.

Mann's wife since 1942 died in 2001; he is survived by three sons. His daughter died in a car accident in 1976.

· Delbert Mann, film and television director, born January 30 1920; died November 11 2007

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