Elmer Bernstein was an American composer and conductor best known for his many film scores. In a career which spanned fifty years, he composed music for hundreds of film and television productions. His most popular works include the scores to The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Bernstein won an Oscar for his score to “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and was nominated for fourteen Oscars in total. He also won two Golden Globes and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.

Bernstein was born in New York City, the son of Selma and Edward Bernstein. Although not related to the celebrated composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, the two were friends. Within the world of professional music, they were distinguished from each other by the use of the nicknames Bernstein West and Bernstein East. During his childhood, Bernstein performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, in the latter case playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest on Broadway, and he also won several prizes for his painting. He gravitated toward music at the age of twelve, at which time he was given a scholarship in piano by Henriette Michelson, a Juilliard teacher who guided him throughout his entire career as a pianist. She took him to play some of his improvisations for composer Aaron Copland, who was encouraging and selected Israel Citkowitz as a teacher for the young boy. Bernstein’s music has some stylistic similarities to Copland’s music, most notably in his western scores and in his spirited score for the 1958 film adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s novel God’s Little Acre.

Eleanor Steber was an American operatic soprano. Steber is noted as one of the first major opera stars to have achieved the highest success with training and a career based in the United States.

Eleanor Steber was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1914. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1940 and was one of its leading artists through 1961. She was known for her large, flexible silvery voice, particularly in the high-lying soprano roles of Richard Strauss. She was equally well-known for her lyrical portrayals of Mozart’s heroines, many in collaboration with conductor Bruno Walter. Beyond Mozart and Strauss her repertoire was quite varied. She was noted for success in the music of Wagner, Alban Berg, Giacomo Puccini and also in French opera. Steber sang the lead in the world premiere of the American opera Vanessa by Samuel Barber. She was also featured in a number of Metropolitan Opera premieres, including Strauss’s Arabella, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Berg’s Wozzeck.

Outside the Metropolitan her career included a 1953 engagement at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, where her performance as Elsa in Lohengrin was highly acclaimed and recorded by Decca Records. She sang with Arturo Toscanini in his 1944 NBC Symphony broadcast of Beethoven’s Fidelio. In 1954 at the Florence May Festival she sang a celebrated performance of Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West with conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. With Sergei Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra she sang the world premiere in 1948 of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915, a work which she commissioned.

Beyond the opera, Steber was popular with radio and television audiences in frequent appearances on The Voice of Firestone, The Bell Telephone Hour and other programs. Her extensive recording output included many popular ballads and operetta tunes in addition to arias, art songs and complete operas. Steber’s sense of fun and adventure endeared her to audiences across the spectrum. In the 1970s she even recorded an album for RCA of songs and arias at the Continental Baths in New York City where Bette Midler was then a regular performer. At the same time she was still heard in recital at Carnegie Hall and sang a noted late-career performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs with James Levine and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Elia Kazan was an American director, described as “one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history”. He also produced, and wrote screenplays and novels. Born in the Ottoman Empire to Anatolian Greek parents, they emigrated to New York when he was four. He spent two years studying acting at Yale and then acted professionally before becoming a stage and film director. He co-founded the influential Group Theater in 1932 and Actors Studio in 1947, and together with Lee Strasberg, introduced Method acting to the American stage and cinema as a new form of self-expression and psychological “realism”. Having been an actor himself for eight years, he brought sensitivity and understanding of the acting process, and was later considered the ideal “actor’s director”.

Kazan introduced a new generation of unknown young actors to the movie audiences, including Marlon Brando and James Dean, but was most noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors. As a result, he directed 21 different actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He was considered “one of the consummate filmmakers of the 20th century”, after directing a continual string of successful films, including, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden. He won three Oscars as Best Director, three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globes. Among the other new actors he introduced to movie audiences for the first time, were Warren Beatty, Carroll Baker, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Lee Remick, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle. He also elicited some of the best performances in the careers of actors like Natalie Wood and James Dunn. Producer George Stevens, Jr. concludes that Kazan’s films and new actors have “changed American moviemaking”.

Most of his films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. He writes, “I don’t move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme. In some way the channel of the film should also be in my own life.” His first such “issue” films was Gentleman’s Agreement, with Gregory Peck, which dealt with hidden anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and 3 wins, and Kazan’s first for Best Director. He followed it with Pinky, one of the first films to address racial prejudice against blacks. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront, a film about union corruption in New York, which some consider “one of the greatest films in the history of international cinema.” A major film earlier in his career was A Streetcar Named Desire, an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed. It received 12 Oscar nominations, winning 4, and was Marlon Brando’s widely acclaimed screen debut. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which also introduced James Dean to movie audiences for the first time, making him an overnight star.

A turning point in Kazan’s career came with his testimony as a “friendly witness” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, which cost him the respect of many liberal friends and colleagues, such as playwright Arthur Miller. Kazan later explains that he took “only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong”. Overall, Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s by his run of provocative, issues-driven subjects, and acting. Moreover, his personal brand of cinema, employing real locations over sets, unknowns over stars, and realism over convenient genres, proved influential to a whole generation of independent filmmakers in the 1960s, such as Sidney Lumet, John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese. Film author Ian Freer concludes that “If his achievements are tainted by political controversy, the debt Hollywood ? and actors everywhere ? owes him, is enormous.”