Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch was born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a tailor, and he began as a comic actor before turning to directing in the German silent industry. There he made lavish historical epics and nimble comedies that traveled internationally, and by the early 1920s Hollywood came calling. Mary Pickford brought him to America, and he stayed to become the screen's supreme poet of urbane romantic comedy.

What critics christened the Lubitsch Touch was less a technique than a sensibility: the art of suggestion, of letting a closed door, a raised eyebrow or a perfectly timed cut convey what censorship forbade him to show. He trusted his audience to be as sophisticated as he was. A glance, an object left on a table, a gag built and paid off across an entire film, these were his instruments, and no one wielded them with such elegance.

His great sound comedies remain models of the form. Trouble in Paradise, a glittering tale of jewel thieves in love, is often called the most perfect of pre-Code comedies. Ninotchka thawed Greta Garbo into laughter with the tagline that promised exactly that. The Shop Around the Corner found aching tenderness in two feuding clerks who are secretly pen-pal sweethearts, a story so durable it has been remade and adapted for generations. And To Be or Not to Be dared to make comedy of Nazi-occupied Warsaw while the war still raged, a gamble that time has vindicated as one of his boldest works.

Lubitsch's influence radiated through everyone who cared about wit on screen. Billy Wilder, his devoted admirer, kept a sign in his office that read "How would Lubitsch do it?" His comedies treated adults as adults, assuming intelligence, desire and a taste for the double meaning.

His health failed him early. After several heart attacks he was given an honorary Academy Award in 1947 for his contribution to the art of the motion picture, and he died that same year at fifty-five. He left behind no imitators who could match him, only the enduring proof that comedy could be as precise, humane and sophisticated as any art the movies produced.