Lewis Milestone — director (oscar) with roots in the Russian Empire
Lewis Milestone was born Leib Mendelevich Milstein on 30 September 1895, the son of a Jewish businessman. Most sources, including Wikipedia, place his birth in Kishinev, capital of the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire and now Chișinău in Moldova; his biographer Harlow Robinson, in Lewis Milestone: Life and Films (2019), gives Odessa, with a boyhood in Kishinev. He was educated partly in Belgium and Germany.
In 1913, at eighteen, he left Kishinev with two friends for the United States, arriving that November (one source gives 1912). After a series of odd jobs he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps shortly after the United States entered the First World War in 1917, working on training films and in aerial photography. On his discharge in 1919 he became an American citizen and legally changed his name to Milestone.
In Hollywood he started as a film cutter and assistant director. Howard Hughes gave him his chance as a director, and his comedy Two Arabian Knights (1927) won the Academy Award for comedy direction at the first ceremony, the only year that category was awarded. After the gangster film The Racket (1928) came his best-known work, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel about young German soldiers in the First World War. A technical landmark of early sound, it won the Academy Awards for best picture and best director, and became a worldwide success. His next film, The Front Page (1931), brought another nomination.
Through the 1930s he moved between genres, with the musical Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933), the thriller The General Died at Dawn (1936), starring Gary Cooper and Akim Tamiroff, and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939). During the Second World War he made a series of war films, among them The North Star, The Purple Heart and A Walk in the Sun (1945), followed by Arch of Triumph (1948), another Remarque adaptation, The Red Pony (1949) and Halls of Montezuma (1951). His later films included Ocean's 11 (1960) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and he ended his career directing episodic television.
He died in Los Angeles on 25 September 1980, five days before his eighty-fifth birthday, and is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park.
"Left Kishinev in 1913 with two friends and arrived in the United States that November (one source gives 1912); US citizen in 1919, when he changed his name to Milestone."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kishinev, Bessarabia Governorate (now Chișinău, Moldova) — Odessa per his 2019 biographer
Born Leib Mendelevich Milstein in 1895 — in Kishinev, Bessarabia Governorate, by most accounts, in Odessa according to his 2019 biographer — the son of a Jewish businessman, he grew up in Kishinev and left for America at eighteen in 1913.
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Kishinev, Bessarabia Governorate (now Chișinău, Moldova) — Odessa per his 2019 biographer. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.