Albert Lewin

Albert Lewin (born September 23, 1894, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died May 9, 1968, New York, New York) was an American film producer, screenwriter, and director who was best known for his literary adaptations, notably The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).

Lewin attended New York University (B.A., 1915) and Harvard University (M.A, 1916). He served in the military during World War I and later worked for the American Jewish Relief Committee. His entertainment career began in the early 1920s when he became a reader for Samuel Goldwyn’s studio, which became part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1924. That year Lewin became a screenwriter at MGM, and by the late 1920s he was studio executive Irving Thalberg’s personal assistant and the head of MGM’s story department. During Thalberg’s reign, he produced (sometimes uncredited) The Kiss (1929), Greta Garbo’s last silent film; The Guardsman (1931); Red-Headed Woman (1932), a hit comedy that helped establish Jean Harlow as a star; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935); and The Good Earth (1937).

After Thalberg died in 1936, Lewin went to Paramount. In 1942 he directed his first film, The Moon and Sixpence, an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham story about an unconventional artist (played by George Sanders), loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin. Lewin also wrote the screenplay, as he would for all the films that he would direct. After completing the movie, he returned to MGM. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he was fired from the biopic Madame Curie (1943), and it was completed by Mervyn LeRoy.

Lewin’s next production was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), arguably his best movie and widely considered the finest adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel. Hurd Hatfield starred as the ageless protagonist, and Sanders and Angela Lansbury were notable in supporting roles. Lewin again turned to literary adaptations with The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), which was from Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami. It featured Sanders and Lansbury as the roguish hero and the woman he foolishly forsakes, respectively.

Lewin received mixed reviews for the romantic mystery Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), which cast Ava Gardner as an American playgirl whose love for a drifter (James Mason) is doomed. Less successful was Saadia (1953), a romance set in Morocco that featured Cornel Wilde, Mel Ferrer, and Rita Gam. In 1957 Lewin directed (with René Cardona) his final film, The Living Idol, about an archaeologist (James Robertson Justice) who believes that a young Mexican woman (Liliane Montevecchi) is the reincarnation of an Aztec who was sacrificed to jaguars.

After suffering a heart attack in the late 1950s, Lewin retired from filmmaking. In 1967 he published the mystery novel The Unaltered Cat.