Lewis Milestone
Hollywood director from Chișinău who won two Oscars for best director
1895-1980
Photo: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Lewis Milestone, born Leib Milstein, grew up in tsarist-era Chișinău and became one of the first Hollywood directors with two Oscars to his name. His adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is still regarded as one of the most incisive anti-war films ever made. He died in Los Angeles in 1980.
Link with MoldovaLewis Milestone was born Leib Milstein in Chișinău in 1895 (some sources say Odesa) and spent his childhood there before leaving for the United States in 1913.
Milestone was born on 30 September 1895 into a well-to-do Jewish family. Most reference works, including Britannica, give Kishinev, today's Chișinău, as his birthplace. A profile in Newsweek România opts for Odesa and has the family moving to Chișinău around 1900. What is certain is that he went to school in Chișinău and learned several foreign languages there.
The link with Moldova
His parents sent him to Mittweida in Saxony to train as an engineer, but the young man preferred the stage. On 14 November 1913, just eighteen, he arrived in Hoboken (New Jersey), with six dollars in his pocket according to his biographers. He changed his name, worked on training films for the US Army Signal Corps during the First World War and became an American citizen in 1919.
In Hollywood he started out as a film editor and assistant director. As a director he won the Oscar for comedy direction for Two Arabian Knights at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, and a year later the Oscar for best director for All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Later films included The Front Page (1931), Of Mice and Men (1939), A Walk in the Sun (1945), Ocean's 11 (1960) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), his last completed film. From the 1950s he also did a great deal of television work.
Where you will find him
His mark lies mainly in film history. Since 1960 he has had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard. Anyone who watches All Quiet on the Western Front today is looking at the work of a director who spent his childhood in the Bessarabia of the tsars, a few streets from what is now the centre of the Moldovan capital.
Key facts
- 1895: born Leib Milstein, in Chișinău according to most sources
- 1913: arrival in the United States
- 1929: Oscar for directing Two Arabian Knights
- 1930: Oscar for best director for All Quiet on the Western Front
- 1960: star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
