Motion picture director and screenwriter. He made his reputation first as a director of critically acclaimed dramatic pictures, melodramas and film noirs in the 1940s, then shifting to polished, popular, high-scale entertainment in the 1950s and 60s. After high school he decided to be a painter and studied art in Bucharest. From 1920 on he continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Julian. After an exhibition of his paintings in New York in 1927 he settled there, working as a painter and portraitist. In 1932, he was hired by Paramount Pictures for his first job in the movie industry, as a sketch artist and technical advisor, later advancing up the ladder to second-unit director and other capacities during the remainder of the decade, including production assistant, assistant director, scenarist and original story writer with increasing success. In 1940, he was approached by Warner Brothers and signed to a contract to direct shorts. As early as 1941 he was able to make his first feature film "Singapore Woman." Other credits during his Warner years include "The Mask of Dimitrios" (1944), "Three Strangers" (1946, both with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre), "Humoresque" (1947, with Joan Crawford and John Garfield) and "Johnny Belinda" (1948, AA for Jane Wyman), for which he was nominated for an Oscar as best director. In 1948 he moved to 20th Century Fox, where he initially made films similar to those he had made at Warner, like the noirs "Road House" (1948) and "Phone Call from a Stranger" (1952, with Bette Davis) or the melodrama "Under My Skin" (1950, with John Garfield) but soon he switched over to lighthearted and more commercial, glossy entertainment, beginning with the expensively made and especially enjoyable masterpiece "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953, with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable), one of the first pictures to be shot in CinemaScope. Other pictures, in a similar vein, were "Woman's World" (1954, with Clifton Webb, Van Heflin and Lauren Bacall), "Three Coins in the Fountain" (1954, with Webb, Jean Peters and Maggie McNamara), Daddy Long Legs" (1955, with Fred Astaire), "Boy on a Dolphin" (1957, with Alan Ladd and Sophia Loren) and "The Best of Everything" (1959, with Hope Lange and Stephen Boyd). After the expiration of his Fox contract, he shot only a few films in the 60s and finished his film career in 1970 with "Hello-Goodbye" (1970, with Curd Jürgens). He then moved to Marbella, Spain, to paint and to collect art. He authored an autobiography "Things I Did ... and Things I Think I Did" (1984).