John Huston

John Huston came into cinema as a writer and made his name on scripts like Raoul Walsh's High Sierra and Howard Hawks' Sergeant York. He moved to directing in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon, adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, and during his army years he made Let There Be Light. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre brought him two Academy Awards, for directing and for screenplay, and at the same ceremony his father Walter Huston was honoured for his performance in that film. Adapting literature became one of the main strands of the work: Melville for Moby Dick, Kipling for The Man Who Would Be King, Flannery O'Connor for Wise Blood. Greed and human folly run through most of it. He directed his last film, The Dead, at eighty, from a wheelchair and on oxygen, and it won him the directing award at the 1988 Independent Spirit ceremony.