Robert Siodmak (6 August 1900 – 10 March 1973) was a German-born film director best known for his work in the United States during The Golden Age of Hollywood.
He started out in the 1920s making silent movies in his native country, including the landmark 1930 film People On Sunday (on which he worked with such other later-famous directors as Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and his own brother Curt), and transitioned easily to sound films. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Siodmak fled to Paris, where he directed a variety of films (and worked with such talents as Maurice Chevalier and Erich von Stroheim) until being forced to flee to the United States after the Nazis invaded France.
Once in Hollywood, Siodmak eventually became a contract director with Universal, where he specialized in Film Noir, using the same Expressionist techniques he had used in Germany (and that other filmmakers from Germany, such as Wilder and Fritz Lang, would use in their own noir work). However, while those movies were popular with both audiences and critics, and he enjoyed working with the actors on them (Charles Laughton and George Sanders gave what they believed were among their best performances for Siodmak, in The Suspect and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, respectively), Siodmak became tired of being typecast as a director of thrillers, longing to do something different. Unfortunately, most of the movies where he attempted to do something different, such as an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Gambler" (The Great Sinner, with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner), turned out to be commercial flops, and the one non-thriller he directed that was a hit, The Crimson Pirate, was a Troubled Production.
Siodmak eventually returned to Germany in the 1950s, where he mostly stayed for the rest of his career. He died seven weeks after the death of his wife, Bertha Odenheimer, whom he had been married to for 40 years.
Films directed by Robert Siodmak with their own page:
- Son of Dracula (1943)
- Cobra Woman (1944)
- The Spiral Staircase (1946)
- The Killers (1946) - his only Academy Award nomination for Best Director
- The Dark Mirror (1946)
- The Crimson Pirate (1952)
- The Devil Strikes at Night (1957) - nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars
- Escape from East Berlin (1962)
