Jean Negulesco was a Romanian-born American director and screenwriter who became famous for the films he directed during the 1940s and 1950s. He started out as a painter and later became a stage decorator. From being a stage decorator he became a sketch artist and then a producer, a screenwriter and finally a director. He worked in restaurants and washed dishes to pay for his classes on painting. When the First World War broke out he enrolled in the French Army and worked in the field hospitals attending to the wounded at the Western Front. After the war he returned to Paris and went through lessons on painting given by Constantin Brancusi. He went back to Romania where he earned a good name as a painter and was able to sell about 150 of his paintings. He again returned to Paris in the early 1920s and started working there as a stage decorator. During the later part of his life he went to Spain and spent the rest of his life there.
