Ulu Grosbard

A celebrated stage and film director, Ulu Grosbard became renowned for features with intense character studies in which actors give superb performances. Born on Jan. 9, 1929 in Antwerp, Belgium, Grosbard immigrated to Havana, Cuba with his family in 1942. Originally trained as a diamond cutter, the family then relocated to America in the late-1940s. After attending the University of Chicago and Yale School of Drama and enduring a brief stint in the U.S. Army, Grosbard made his stage directorial debut with a production of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" on Long Island, NY. He would later earn critical plaudits and accolades for a 1965 off-Broadway production of the same play. He entered feature films as an assistant director working with such masters as Elia Kazan on "Splendor in the Grass" (1961), Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins on "West Side Story" (1961), Robert Rossen on "The Hustler" (1961) and Arthur Penn on "The Miracle Worker" (1962). Grosbard made his off-Broadway directorial debut in 1962 with "The Days & Nights of Bebee Fenstermaker" and triumphed with his handling of the Broadway production of Frank Gilroy's Pulitzer Prize-winner "The Subject was Roses" two years later.