John Berry

John Berry (September 6, 1917 – November 29, 1999) was an American film director, who went into exile in France when his career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist. Early life Berry was born Jak Szold in The Bronx, New York, the son of a Polish-Jewish father and a Romanian mother. He was a child performer in vaudeville, first going on stage at the age of four. In his teens he briefly worked as a boxer under the name Jackie Sold. Berry's father was a restaurateur who at one point owned 28 restaurants around New York City but he went out of business during the Great Depression and Berry sought to support himself by working as a comedian and master of ceremonies in the Catskill resorts as well as working as an actor. Mercury Theatre and Hollywood Berry's first big break came when he was hired by the Mercury Theatre for its debut production, titled Caesar (1937). Berry acted in other roles with the theater and assisted Orson Welles in directing the 1942 production of Native Son. In a late-life interview with The New York Times, Berry spoke positively of his association with Welles and John Houseman, who co-founded the Mercury. "It was like living near the center of a volcano of creating inspiration and fury, glamorous and exciting, full of the kind of theatricality that seems lost forever," he said. By 1943, Houseman was producing films in Hollywood at Paramount Pictures and hired Berry, who attended Paramount Studios' director-in-training programme, to direct Houseman's production of Miss Susie Slagle's starring Veronica Lake and Lillian Gish. Berry stayed with Paramount in Hollywood and directed other features, including From This Day Forward and Cross My Heart. Berry was sacked by Paramount for refusing to direct the studio's 1946 Alan Ladd spy film O.S.S.