Losey, Joseph (1909-1984), was an American movie director known for motion pictures that were both controversial and critically praised. Losey made his most successful movies while working in the United Kingdom and France beginning in 1951. Several of his films, notably The Servant (1964), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1972) focus on social class and hierarchies. All three films had screenplays by the English playwright Harold Pinter.
Joseph Walton Losey was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Jan. 14, 1909. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. degree in 1929 and received an M.A. degree from Harvard University in 1930. Losey worked briefly as a reporter for a theatrical newspaper. In 1936, he joined the Federal Theater Project in New York City, a government program for unemployed theater people. There, he attracted political controversy with his play Injunction Granted, a socially critical drama. The government closed it on the grounds that it was a misuse of public funds. Losey resigned from the project but stayed in New York to direct off-Broadway plays and radio drama. In the mid-1940’s, he began making short movies.
In 1947, Losey helped the German playwright Bertolt Brecht stage the English version of his play Life of Galileo, which portrayed the hounding of a great scientist by the authorities of the day. Losey’s first feature film, The Boy with Green Hair, followed in 1948. It showed Losey’s commitment to social criticism. Four more films followed, all critical of American society. Notable among them was The Prowler (1951), a movie about police corruption. In 1951, the House Un-American Activities Committee accused Losey of having Communist sympathies. Losey and many other Hollywood filmmakers and stars of that era were blacklisted (denied employment) for that reason. Losey settled in London after failing to find work in the United States.
Losey worked in the United Kingdom and then France for the rest of his life. His first movies were made under pseudonyms, but with The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), he returned to directing films under his own name. Beginning in the mid-1970’s, Losey worked mostly in France, where he directed Mr. Klein (1976), the opera Don Giovanni (1979), and La Truite (The Trout, 1982). He returned to England to direct his last film, Steaming (released in 1985, after his death). He died on June 22, 1984, in London.
