Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Edwards began his career in the 1940s as an actor, but he soon began writing screenplays and radio scripts before turning to producing and directing in television and films. His best-known films include Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), A Shot in the Dark (1964), The Great Race (1965), 10 (1979), Victor/Victoria (1982), Blind Date (1987), and the hugely successful Pink Panther film series with British actor Peter Sellers.

Born William Blake Crump July 26, 1922, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was the son of Donald and Lillian (née Grommett) Crump (1897–1992). In an interview with André Previn, Blake Edwards claimed to be a descendant of William Blake. His father reportedly left the family before he was born. His mother married again, to Jack McEdward, who became his stepfather. McEdward was the son of J. Gordon Edwards, a director of silent movies, and in 1925, he moved the family to Los Angeles and became a film production manager. In an interview with The Village Voice in 1971, Blake Edwards said that he had "always felt alienated, estranged from my own father, Jack McEdward". After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in the class of Winter 1941, Blake began taking jobs as an actor during World War II. Edwards describes this period: I worked with the best directors – Ford, Wyler, Preminger – and learned a lot from them. But I wasn't a very cooperative actor. I was a spunky, smart-assed kid. Maybe even I was indicating that I wanted to give, not take, direction. Edwards served in the United States Coast Guard during World War II, where he suffered a severe back injury, which left him in pain for years afterwards.

Edwards's debut as a director came in 1952 on the television program Four Star Playhouse. In the 1954–1955 television season, Edwards joined with Richard Quine to create Mickey Rooney's first television series, The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan. Edwards's hard-boiled private detective scripts for Richard Diamond, Private Detective became NBC's answer to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, reflecting Edwards's unique humor. Edwards also created, wrote, and directed the 1958–61 TV detective series Peter Gunn, which starred Craig Stevens, with music by Henry Mancini. The following year, Edwards produced Mr. Lucky, an adventure series on CBS starring John Vivyan and Ross Martin. Mancini's association with Edwards continued in his film work, significantly contributing to their success. Edwards's most popular films were comedies, the melodrama Days of Wine and Roses being a notable exception. His most dynamic and successful collaboration was with Peter Sellers in six of the movies in the Pink Panther series. Edwards later directed the comedy film 10 with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek.

Operation Petticoat was Edwards's first big-budget movie as a director. The film, which starred Cary Grant and Tony Curtis and was produced by Grant's own production company, Granart Company, became the "greatest box-office success of the decade for Universal [Studios]" and made Edwards a recognized director.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, based on the novella by Truman Capote, is credited with establishing him as a "cult figure" with many critics. Andrew Sarris called it the "directorial surprise of 1961", and it became a "romantic touchstone" for college students in the early 1960s.

Days of Wine And Roses, a dark psychological film about the effects of alcoholism on a previously happy marriage, starred Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. It has been described as "perhaps the most unsparing tract against drink that Hollywood has yet produced, more pessimistic than Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend". The film gave another major boost to Edwards's reputation as an important director.

According to critic George Morris, Darling Lili "synthesizes every major Edwards theme: the disappearance of gallantry and honor, the tension between appearances and reality and the emotional, spiritual, moral, and psychological disorder" in such a world. Edwards used complex cinematography techniques, including long-shot zooms, tracking, and focus distortion, to great effect. However, the film failed badly with most critics and at the box office. Despite a cost of $17 million to make, it was seen by few cinema-goers, and the few who did watch were unimpressed. It brought Paramount Pictures to "the verge of financial collapse", and became an example of "self-indulgent extravagance" in filmmaking "that was ruining Hollywood". Darling Lili star Julie Andrews had married Edwards in 1969.

Edwards married his first wife, actress Patricia Walker, in 1953; they divorced in 1967. Edwards and Walker had two children, including Jennifer Edwards. Walker appeared in the comedy All Ashore (1953), for which Edwards was one of the screenwriters. Edwards also named one of his film production companies, Patricia Productions, Incorporated, after her. Edwards's second marriage, from 1969 until his death in 2010, was to Julie Andrews. They were married for 41 years. He was the stepfather to Emma, from Andrews's previous marriage. In the 1970s, Edwards and Andrews adopted two Vietnamese girls.

Edwards also directed most of the comedy film series The Pink Panther, the majority of installments starring Peter Sellers as the inept Inspector Clouseau. The relationship between the director and the lead actor was considered a fruitful yet complicated one with many disagreements during production. At various times in their film relationship, "he more than once swore off Sellers" as too hard to direct. However, in his later years, he admitted that working with Sellers was often irresistible: "We clicked on comedy and we were lucky we found each other because we both had so much respect for it. We also had an ability to come up with funny things and great situations that had to be explored. But in that exploration there would often times be disagreement. But I couldn't resist those moments when we jelled. And if you ask me who contributed most to those things, it couldn't have happened unless both of us were involved, even though it wasn't always happy." Five of those films involved Edwards and Sellers in original material; those films being The Pink Panther (1963), A Shot in the Dark (1964), The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). (1968's Inspector Clouseau, the third film in the series, was made without the involvement of Edwards or Sellers.) The films were all highly profitable: The Return of the Pink Panther, for example, cost just $2.5 million to make but grossed $100 million, while The Pink Panther Strikes Again did even better. After Sellers's death in 1980, Edwards directed three further Pink Panther films. Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) consisted of unused material of Sellers from The Pink Panther Strikes Again as well as previously seen material from the earlier films. Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) and Son of the Pink Panther (1993) were further attempts by Edwards to continue the series without Sellers but both films were critical and financial disappointments. Edwards eventually retired from film making two years after the release of Son of the Pink Panther.

Having grown up in Hollywood, the stepson of a studio production manager and stepgrandson of a silent-film director, Edwards had watched the films of the great silent-era comedians, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy. He and Sellers appreciated and understood the comedy styles in silent films and tried to recreate them in their work together. After their immense success with the first two Pink Panther films, The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964), which adapted many silent-film aspects, including slapstick, they attempted to go even further in The Party (1968). The film has always had a cult following, and some critics and fans have considered it a "masterpiece in this vein" of silent comedy, though it did include minimal dialogue.