Andrew V. McLaglen
Biography
Andrew Victor McLaglen ((July 28, 1920 – August 30, 2014) was a British-American film and television director and former actor. Andrew McLaglen was born in London, the son of British actor Victor McLaglen and Enid Lamont. He was from a film family that included eight uncles and an aunt, and he grew up on movie sets with his parents as well as John Wayne and John Ford. After working as an assistant director on a few smaller films, Ford gave him the assistant director job on the film The Quiet Man (1952). After a few more assistant or second director jobs, McLaglen directed his first film Gun The Man Down in 1956 - a western B-movie with James Arness, Angie Dickinson and Harry Carey, Jr.. He went on to work extensively in television directing, directing episodes of Perry Mason (7), Gunslinger (5), Rawhide (6), and then 99 episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel, The Lieutenant (4), The Virginian (2), and 96 episodes of Gunsmoke. Returning to films - directing Shenandoah (1965) and The Rare Breed (1966), both with James Stewart; The Devil's Brigade (1968), Mitchell (1975), The Wild Geese (1978), North Sea Hijack (1979), and The Sea Wolves (1980), mostly westerns, but later specializing in war or action films, his last being Return from the River Kwai (1989). He also worked many times with John Wayne in such films as McLintock! (1963), Hellfighters (1968), The Undefeated (1969), Chisum (1970), and Cahill U.S. Marshal (1973). He also directed The Last Hard Men (1976) which starred Charlton Heston and James Coburn. McLaglen directed films in an assortment of categories, including crime, war, historical and comedy, but he was most frequently a director of Westerns, and would be among the last of the American film directors to specialize in the Western genre.
Known For & Full Filmography5 Titles
Movie - 1944, 2h 15m • as Former Plowboy (uncredited)
In 1943, several people enter, re-enter, and exit the difficult life of a Midwestern family whose patriarch has been called up to war, leaving behind his wife and two teen daughters.
Movie - 1978, 2h 15m • as Self
Promotional short film about the making of the 1978 film The Wild Geese.
Movie - 1977, 2h 15m • as Self
German TV documentary about John Wayne from 1977.
Movie - 1991, 2h 15m • as Self
Film traces the career of the actor who embodied classic American values like no other - in his film and television roles as well as in his private life. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he became an icon of the western. The documentary follows Wayne from his first steps in the film business, when he was still honing his image as an upright hero, through his great successes to the end of his career, when even the US Congress bowed to his lifetime achievement and awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal. His colleague Maureen O'Hara, who stood in front of the camera with him in Rio Grande (1950), said that the medal should bear the following engraving to do justice to Duke: "John Wayne - American".
Movie - 1945, 2h 15m • as Sgt. McNair
Constance Bennett both produced and starred in the espionager Paris Underground. Bennett and Gracie Fields play, respectively, an American and an English citizen trapped in Paris when the Nazis invade. The women team up to help Allied aviators escape from the occupied city into Free French territory. The screenplay was based on the true wartime activities of Etta Shiber, who engineered the escape of nearly 300 Allied pilots. British fans of comedienne Gracie Fields were put off by the scenes in which she is tortured by the Gestapo, while Constance Bennett's following had been rapidly dwindling since the 1930s; as a result, the heartfelt but tiresome Paris Underground failed to make a dent at the box-office. It would be Constance Bennett's last starring film--and Gracie Fields' last film, period.