Vincent Sherman

A working director in Hollywood for more than five decades, and an actor and screenwriter before that, Vincent Sherman has never been designated an "auteur" by cineastes, but he nevertheless directed such Hollywood classics as "Mr. Skeffington" (1945), as well as "The Hard Way" (1942), which won Ida Lupino the New York Film Critics Award, and films starring Paul Newman, Rita Hayworth, and Humphrey Bogart, to name a few. For much of his career, Sherman was typed as a "woman's director," but he not only fought that designation with work in such films as "All Through the Night" (1941), a taut spy drama starring Bogart and Peter Lorre. His tenacity also carried him into several decades of TV work while other directors from the heydays of the studio system could not adapt.