Born Wilhelm Fried in Tulchva, Hungary to German-Jewish parents. In the US from the age of nine months, he grew up in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. As the eldest of 13 children, six of whom survived their infancy, he helped support the family from an early age, selling newspapers, stove polish, and candy lozenges after school hours. At 11 he left school to work at a garment center sweatshop for 12 hours a day. Eventually he started his own garment business and was modestly successful. In 1904 he bought a failing Brooklyn penny arcade from J. Stuart Blackton and turned it into a booming operation. He soon developed his enterprise into a chain of 15 motion picture theaters in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Realizing there were more profits to be made in distribution, he started his own film exchange, The Greater New York Rental Company. After successfully foiling an attempt by the monopolistic Patent Company to acquire his business, he decided to make his own films and formed the Box Office Attraction Company, which began production in 1912. Meanwhile, his theater chain as well as his rental firm continued to grow, and in 1915 he combined all three wings of his little empire -- production, leasing, and exhibition -- under one roof, the Fox Film Corporation. This soon developed from a modest family business (Fox's wife, Eve, selected scripts and sometimes supervised production) into a prosperous Hollywood studio employing such popular stars as Theda Bara, William Farnum, Betty Blythe, Annette Kellerman, and Tom Mix. Its big prestige picture in the 20s was Murnau's SUNRISE (1927). By the end of the decade the company was turning out some 50 films a year and its value was estimated at some $200 million. The ambitious Fox set out to expand his sizable empire further by acquiring hundreds of movie theaters and by purchasing a controlling interest in Loew's, Inc., the parent company of MGM, as well as a 45 percent interest in Gaumont-British, England's most important producing, distributing, and exhibiting company. Fox was only steps away from becoming Hollywood's most powerful magnate when the stock market collapse, government antitrust action, and a personal injury in an automobile crash which immobilized him for two months late in 1929, combined to shake the foundations of the Fox Corporation. In 1930, Fox was forced to sell his shares in the company to a group of bankers for $18 million. Continual court litigations rapidly dwindled his assets and in 1936 he declared bankruptcy. In 1941 he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for allegedly bribing a judge in his bankruptcy hearing. He served six months in a Pennsylvania penitentiary before being released on parole in 1943. He eventually paid off his debts and managed to live comfortably on the proceeds of some patents he still held, such as the German Tri-Ergon sound systems, whose American rights he had acquired in 1929. Fox's eventful life story was dramatically told by author Upton Sinclair in the 1933 book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. From 1914 until 1935, Fox was listed as "presenter" of over 500 films; he was listed as either producer or executive producer on more than 100 more during the same period.    Nominated for Production 1927-28: SEVENTH HEAVEN - Producer 1 nomination