When he was 15, he was working in a military hospital during World War I. George Enescu, the Romanian composer, came to play the violin to the war wounded; Negulesco drew a portrait of him, and Enesco bought it. Negulesco decided to be a painter and studied art in Bucharest.[4]
In 1927, he visited New York City for an exhibition of his paintings and settled there.[4]
He then made his way to California, at first working as a portraitist.[6]
He became interested in movies and made an experimental feature film, financed as well as written and directed by himself, called Three and a Day. Through his contact with the film's star, Mischa Auer, he managed to get a job at Paramount.[7]
He worked his way to assistant producer, second unit director.[1]
Warner Brothers
Negulesco went to Warner Brothers in 1940. He made his reputation at Warner Bros by directing short subjects, particularly a series of band shorts featuring unusual camera angles and dramatic use of shadows and silhouettes.
His 1959 movie The Best of Everything was on Entertainment Weekly's Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time.
During his Hollywood career and in his 1984 autobiography Things I Did and Things I Think I Did, Negulesco claimed to have been born on 29 February 1900; he apparently was motivated to make this statement because birthdays on leap year day are comparatively rare (and even though 1900 was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, it was under the Julian calendar, which applied in Romania at that time).
From the late 1960s Negulesco lived in Marbella, Spain, where he died, at age 93, of heart failure. He is buried in the Virgen del Carmen cemetery in Marbella.[10]
Filmography
Shorts
Alice in Movieland (1940)
The Flag of Humanity (1940)
Joe Reichman and His Orchestra (1940)
Henry Busse and His Orchestra (1940)
Skinnay Ennis and His Orchestra (1941)
The Dog in the Orchard (1941)
Jan Garber and His Orchestra (1941)
Cliff Edwards and His Buckaroos (1941)
Freddie Martin and His Orchestra (1941)
Marie Green and Her Merry Men (1941)
Hal Kemp and His Orchestra (1941)
Those Good Old Days (1941)
University of Southern California Band and Glee Club (1941)
Many of Negulesco's home movies are held by the Academy Film Archive; the archive has preserved a number of them, including behind-the-scenes footage of Negulesco's films.[11]
Michelangelo Capua, "Jean Negulesco. The Life and the Films," McFarland, Jefferson, N.C., 2017 ISBN978-1476666532
Leff, Leonard J. "What in the World Interests Women? Hollywood, Postwar America, and 'Johnny Belinda.'" Journal of American Studies 31#32 (1997), pp. 385–405. online
