Sidney Lumet — director (12 angry men) with roots in the Russian Empire
Sidney Arthur Lumet was born in Philadelphia on 25 June 1924, the son of Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Lumet, née Wermus, Jewish veterans of the Yiddish theatre who had come to the United States from Poland. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father.
Baruch Lumet was born in Warsaw on 16 September 1898, when the city was part of Congress Poland within the Russian Empire, into a Yiddish-speaking family. He became an actor, director, producer and writer for the Yiddish stage, and in 1922 emigrated to the United States with his wife and their daughter Felicia; Sidney was born two years later. Published sources do not record where Eugenia, a dancer, was born. She died when Sidney was a child. Baruch went on acting into old age and died in 1992.
Sidney began performing almost as soon as he could talk: on radio at four, and at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York at four or five, sources differ. In 1935, aged eleven, he appeared on Broadway in Dead End, and he worked as a child actor through the late 1930s. The Second World War took him into four years of military service. Afterwards he directed plays and taught acting, and in 1947 formed an off-Broadway acting group whose members included Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach.
From 1950 he directed live television at CBS, making some two hundred dramas for series including Playhouse 90 and Studio One. Henry Fonda chose him to direct the film version of 12 Angry Men (1957), his first feature, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin and brought him his first Academy Award nomination as director. Over five decades he made more than forty films, most of them in New York, among them Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), The Wiz (1978) and The Verdict (1982), and was nominated four times for Best Director without winning. His last film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, appeared in 2007.
He received the Directors Guild of America's D. W. Griffith Award in 1993 and an honorary Academy Award, presented in 2005, for his services to screenwriters, performers and the art of the motion picture. He died at home in Manhattan on 9 April 2011, aged eighty-six.
"Baruch Lumet emigrated from Poland to the United States with his family in 1922."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Warsaw (Congress Poland)
His father, Baruch Lumet, a Yiddish theatre actor, was born in Warsaw in 1898, when the city was in Congress Poland within the Russian Empire, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1922. Sidney was born in Philadelphia in 1924 and made his stage debut at the age of five at the Yiddish Art Theatre.
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Warsaw (Congress Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The moment you stop learning, you start dying."