Though not as consistent as Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting firstrate performances from his actors and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York Lumet has made over 40 movies, often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. He often tells intelligent, complex stories. Although his politics are somewhat leftleaning and he often treats socially relevant themes in his films, he doesnt want to make political movies in the first place, and some of them Serpico 1973, Dog Day Afternoon 1975, Prince of the City 1981, Q & A 1990 are atmospherically comparable to the gritty, intense films of Scorsese. Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s such as Dead End, and his acting debut in films came in One Third of a Nation 1939. In 1947 he started an offBroadway acting troupe that included such future stars as Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and other former members of Lee Strasbergs Actors Studio who had become unsatisfied with Strasbergs concepts. Lumet made his stage directing debut in 1955. However, he had been directing television shows since 1950, beginning at CBS, and soon became regarded as an important TV director. He piloted about 150 episodes of the crime series Danger 1950 and 26 episodes of You Are There 1953 he was still directing successful TV teleplays as late as 1960, long after he had become an established film director. He made his feature film directing debut with the critical and financial hit 12 Angry Men 1957, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history. It takes place almost entirely in a jury room in several Lumet films you can find the motif of the closed space. His second and third films, Stage Struck 1958 and That Kind of Woman 1959 respectively, are considered less important. Lumet directed Marlon Brando in the imperfect but very good The Fugitive Kind 1960, an underrated, financially unsuccessful adaptation of Tennessee Williams Orpheus Descending.

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