Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, son of a homeopathic doctor who taught him chess and gave him his first camera at 13. By his own account and his teachers', he was a mediocre student with poor attendance at William Howard Taft High School, saved from a wasted adolescence by the camera and the chessboard, both of which rewarded patience and reading an opponent rather than grades. At 17 he sold a photograph of a despondent newsstand vendor to Look magazine, was hired as an apprentice photographer soon after, and spent his late teens and early twenties shooting boxers, jazz musicians, and celebrities for the magazine instead of finishing the City College classes he had drifted into.

Kubrick financed his first two documentaries and his 1953 debut feature, Fear and Desire, largely with poker winnings and family loans, then built a run that reset what a studio picture could look like: Paths of Glory in 1957, Spartacus in 1960, Lolita in 1962, Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Barry Lyndon in 1975, The Shining in 1980, and Full Metal Jacket in 1987. He moved to England in 1961 for Lolita and never really left, running every stage of a film, writing, casting, editing, and even distribution logistics, from Childwickbury Manor, his estate outside London. He shot dozens of takes of ordinary lines, more than 70 on some Shining setups, and finished editing his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, days before he died.

The control that made the films also isolated the man who made them. Kubrick stopped flying after Dr. Strangelove, so productions came to him, and actors describe both a generous collaborator and someone capable of running a performer through take after take of the same scene for weeks, as he famously did with Shelley Duvall on The Shining. Full Metal Jacket's drill-instructor sequences drew on real Marine Corps abuse so effectively that critics still argue where the fiction ended. Spartacus, made under a Kirk Douglas production contract that limited his authority, was the only film of his mature career he did not fully control, and he mostly disowned it afterward for exactly that reason.

Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for Warner Bros., and Steven Spielberg finished A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a project the two had discussed for years, from Kubrick's notes. His only competitive Oscar came for the visual effects on 2001, a film several early reviewers found baffling and slow before it became a fixture on virtually every serious list of great films. The Library of Congress added both 2001 and Dr. Strangelove to the National Film Registry, and Barry Lyndon, dismissed on release as cold and slow, is now the Kubrick film most cinematographers cite first.

Stanley Kubrick's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Dr. Strangelove film
  Nuclear-war satire — National Film Registry 1964
• 2001: A Space Odyssey film
  His only competitive Academy Award, for visual effects 1968
• A Clockwork Orange film 1971
• Barry Lyndon film
  Won four Academy Awards, more than any other Kubrick film 1975
• The Shining film 1980
• Full Metal Jacket film 1987

• July 26, 1928 aged 0 Born in Manhattan, New York City
• 1945 aged ~17 Sells his first photograph to Look magazine at 17
• 1953 aged ~25 Releases Fear and Desire, his debut feature
• 1958 aged ~30 Marries Christiane Harlan
• 1961 aged ~33 Moves to England to make Lolita and settles there permanently
• April 1968 aged 39 Releases 2001: A Space Odyssey
• May 1980 aged 51 Releases The Shining
• March 7, 1999 aged 70 Dies at Childwickbury Manor days after finishing Eyes Wide Shut

• Steven Spielberg b. 1946
  Director and producer whose blockbusters and dramas have defined American cinema for five decades. finished his unfinished project
• Jack Nicholson b. 1937
  Three-time Oscar winner and one of the most celebrated actors in Hollywood history. directed
• Stephen King b. 1947
  Prolific novelist whose horror and suspense fiction became a major force in American popular culture. adapted, and publicly criticized by
• Tom Cruise b. 1962
  Action superstar and producer whose Mission: Impossible franchise and box office dominance span four decades. directed, in his final film