Person Biography:
Douglas Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1897, in Hamburg, Germany, to a journalist father who was Danish. Sirk's parents were both Danish, and he would go on to make movies in German, Danish, and English. Sirk's early life was influenced by his parents' profession and his own interest in theater and cinema. He began his career as a theatrical director in his native Hamburg and later moved to Germany, where he directed films for UFA Studios.
Sirk's path to Hollywood began when he left Germany in 1937 after his second wife, Hilde Jary, fled to Rome to escape persecution as a Jew. Sirk joined the community of émigré/refugee film people working in Hollywood and made his first American film, Hitler's Madman, in 1943. He went on to work at Universal International in the 1950s, where he made nine films, many of which starred Rock Hudson.
Sirk's personal life was marked by a love-hate relationship with Hollywood and American society. He and his wife did not approve of the excesses of the Hollywood lifestyle, and they eventually left the US for Switzerland in 1959. Sirk continued to work in film, making one more feature-length film in German in 1963, before retiring from American filmmaking.
In retirement, Sirk's reputation as a filmmaker began to blossom, particularly among French New Wave critics who developed the "auteur" theory of film criticism. Sirk's films were reevaluated as paradigmatic dissections of conformist 1950s American society, and he became one of the most revered of Hollywood's auteurs.
