Delbert Martin Mann Jr. (January 30, 1920 – November 11, 2007) was an American television and film director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Marty (1955), adapted from a 1953 teleplay of the same name which he had also directed.[1] From 1967 to 1971, he was president of the Directors Guild of America.[2][3] In 2002, he received the DGA's honorary life member award.[4] Mann was credited to have "helped bring TV techniques to the film world."[5][6]
Mann was head of his high school drama club when he met Fred Coe, the future television producer and director, who was leading a church-sponsored acting society. Coe would later figure prominently in Mann's career as a director.[2] Coe would also serve as Mann's mentor.[12] Mann studied political science in Vanderbilt University.[13] He graduated there in 1941 with a bachelor's degree on political science.[1][7][10][14] During World War II, Mann served with the Army Air Corps as a B-24 bomber pilot and then as an intelligence officer with the 8th Air Force stationed in England.[1][2] Mann also attended the Yale School of Drama, where he earned a master's fine arts degree in directing.[1][2][7][13]
Career
Television
Mann took a directing job at the Town Theatre, a community playhouse in Columbia, South Carolina. Mann was affiliated with the Town Theatre from 1947 to 1949, before moving to New York to work with Coe in television.[12] In 1949, at Coe's invitation, Mann joined him in New York, where he became a stage manager and assistant director at NBC. Within months, he became an alternating director of the anthology series, The Philco Television Playhouse.[4]
Between 1949 and 1955, Mann directed more than 100 live television dramas. But even after turning to films, he returned to television and directed productions for Playhouse 90, Ford Star Jubilee and other dramatic television anthology series. He also directed more than two dozen films for television from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, including Heidi (1968), David Copperfield (1969), Jane Eyre (1970) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1979).[4]
Mann was married to Ann Caroline Gillespie from 1942 until her death by Alzheimer's disease in 2001.[1][2][7][13] They had four children: Fred, David, Steven and Susan. Susan died in a car accident in 1976.[1][2][7][14]
During the 1980s and 1990s, Mann served on the advisory board of the National Student Film Institute. He also served as honorary chairman of the institute for a one-year term.[16][17]
^National Student Film Institute/L.A: The Sixteenth Annual Los Angeles Student Film Festival. The Directors Guild Theatre. June 10, 1994. pp. 10–11.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Los Angeles Student Film Institute: 13th Annual Student Film Festival. The Directors Guild Theatre. June 7, 1991. p. 3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
