Born in Craiova, Romania. Former painter turned Hollywood director who moved to the US in 1927 and began his film career as a sketch artist for title designs and montage sequences. Negulesco later worked as an assistant producer, second-unit director and co-screenwriter before making his first directorial effort, SINGAPORE WOMAN in 1941. Negulesco did some of his finest directing for Warner Bros. in the 1940s, showing a flair for polished melodrama and film noir. The complexly plotted THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944) was an admirable showcase for a debuting Zachary Scott and the Warner Bros. stock company, while THREE STRANGERS (1946) brought together the formidable trio of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Geraldine Fitzgerald in an unusual tale of cross and double-cross. Negulesco's talent for showcasing his female stars was confirmed with the touching Ida Lupino vehicle, DEEP VALLEY (1947) and in the admirably adult JOHNNY BELINDA (1948), in which Jane Wyman gave a memorable Oscar®-winning performance as a deaf-mute rape victim. Negulesco moved to 20th Century-Fox later in 1948, and his first film there, ROAD HOUSE, was consistent with his earlier work. A standardly plotted noir, it nonetheless brought together the formidable starring quartet of Lupino, Richard Widmark, Cornel Wilde and Celeste Holm and built to an explosive finale. Negulesco also did quite well with the restrained wartime women prisoner saga, THREE CAME HOME (1950), spotlighting Claudette Colbert and Sessue Hayakawa, and with the unjustly neglected TAKE CARE OF MY LITTLE GIRL (1951). As his tenure at Fox progressed, Negulesco continued to deliver glossy star vehicles featuring handsome visuals, but the plotting was often routine and the cumulative narrative drive less gripping. Negulesco continued to show a tendency toward all-star films about groups of three or four people, but the importance shifted from their interactions among each other to their own separate stories. The entertaining if insubstantial comedy HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953) with Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe was typical in this respect, and the historical recreation TITANIC (1953) proved to be one of his better films from this period. One of Negulesco's best-remembered films, THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN (1954), which was extremely popular in its day and critically fairly well-received, continued in this vein, as three women found romance in an Italy so handsomely photographed that the film's travelogue style took precedence over its dramatic thrust. WOMAN'S WORLD (1954) came back to the States, wherein three wives jockeyed to get their husbands an important promotion; the surface glamour was there, but little else of note remained. DADDY LONG LEGS (1955) was overlong but nonetheless warmly appealing for the acting of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, if not their dancing. BOY ON A DOLPHIN (1957) only revamped Negulesco's tourist guide sheen, and THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (1959) brought together yet another trio of upwardly mobile working women in an undistinguished if watchable manner. During the 1960s Negulesco made a handful of films of little note and later dabbled in art collecting and real estate. If, in retrospect, his career seems to have been swamped by increasingly vapid, star-heavy glamourfests, he nevertheless helmed a number of very fine films and proved himself a reliable and talented purveyor of smooth entertainment.  Nominated for Directing 1948: JOHNNY BELINDA 1 nomination