Preston Sturges (; born Edmund Preston Biden; August 29, 1898 – August 6, 1959) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic and mature, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene.
Prior to Sturges, other figures in Hollywood (such as Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Frank Capra) had directed films from their own scripts; however, Sturges is often regarded as the first Hollywood figure to establish success as a screenwriter and then move into directing his own scripts, at a time when those roles were separate. He sold the story for The Great McGinty to Paramount Pictures for $10 in exchange for directing it. Anthony Lane writes that "To us, that seems old hat, one of the paths by which the ambitious get to run their own show, but back in 1940, when The Great McGinty came out, it was very new hat indeed; the opening credits proclaimed 'Written and directed by Preston Sturges,' and it was the first time in the history of talkies that the two passive verbs had appeared together onscreen. From that conjunction sprang a whole tradition of filmmaking: literate, spiky, defensive, markedly personal, and almost always funny." For that film, Sturges was the first person to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Sturges went on to receive Oscar nominations for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). He also wrote and directed The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942), each considered classic comedies, appearing on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Laughs.
Early life
Sturges was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Mary Estelle Dempsey (later known as Mary Desti or Mary D'Este) and traveling salesman Edmund C. Biden. His maternal grandparents, Catherine Campbell Smyth and Dominick d'Este Dempsey, were immigrants from Ireland, and his father was of English descent.
When Sturges was two years old, his eccentric mother left America to pursue a singing career in Paris, where she annulled her marriage with Preston's father. Returning to America, Dempsey met her third husband, the wealthy stockbroker Solomon Sturges, who adopted Preston in 1902. According to biographers, Solomon Sturges was "diametrically opposite to Mary and her bohemianism". This included her close friendship with Isadora Duncan, as the young Sturges would sometimes travel from country to country with Duncan's dance company. Mary also carried on a romantic affair with Aleister Crowley and collaborated with him on his magnum opus Magick. As a young man, Sturges bounced back and forth between Europe and the United States. As Sturges spent much of his childhood and youth in France, he ended up fluent in French and a Francophile who always considered France his "second home".
In 1916, he worked as a runner for New York stock brokers, a position he obtained through Solomon Sturges. The next year, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service, and graduated as a lieutenant from Camp Dick in Texas without seeing action. While at camp, Sturges wrote an essay, "Three Hundred Words of Humor", which was printed in the camp newspaper, becoming his first published work. Returning from camp, Sturges picked up a managing position at the Desti Emporium in New York, a store owned by his mother's fourth husband. He spent eight years (1919–1927) there, until he married the first of his four wives, Estelle De Wolfe.
Sturges's 1928 turn to playwriting was accidental. While on a date with a young actress of certain renown, the actress informed Sturges that while she had pretended to find him witty and charming, she actually considered him a bore. "The only reason I'm going out with you, sir, is for the same reason that a scientist embraces a guinea pig; I just like to try my situations out on you to see how they turn out." She claimed that the dramatic research was for a play she was writing. Outraged, Sturges told her that if she could write a play, he could write a play, but that his would be better and run longer. Within two months, he had written his first play: The Guinea Pig, only to find out that she wasn't writing a play at all, and that she was surprised and flattered that he had taken her ravings so seriously.