When Val Lewton died from a heart attack at Los Angles’ Ceders-Sinai hospital in 1951, he was only 46 years old. Yet despite his young age, he’d already made a huge contribution to American film. And this primarily during the four years, from 1942 to 1946, he headed up RKO’s horror department. During that period, he produced 8 films that would change the shape of horror. Born in Yalta, Ukraine as Vladimir Ivan Leverton, he became Val Lewton when he immigrated to the United States in 1909.  After studying journalism at Columbia, Lewton took to writing fiction and non-fiction, often confusing the two. On several occasions he was fired from newspapers after he fictionalized a story. When his 1932 novel No Bed of Her Own was adapted into a film for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Lewton moved to Hollywood. Hired originally as a writer, he became a story editor and was eventually tapped to take over the horror unit at the cash-strapped RKO Pictures. The job was hardly a Hollywood power play. He could exercise creative liberty, as long each film came in under $150,000, ran 75 minutes, and was created from titles fed him by the marketing department. “They may think I'm going to do the usual chiller stuff which'll make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten,” Lewton told friends, “but I'm going to fool them . . . I'm going to do the kind of suspense movie I like.” What he liked was sophisticated thrillers fueled by psychological terror. For his film, Cat People, Lewton recruited a crew of talented artists, including director Jacques Tourneur and screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen. Ironically, Lewton suffered from gatophobia, an irrational fear of cats, so he used his own nightmares to craft a stylish tale of feline fear that also made money. Costing only $134,000 to make, Cat People pulled in over $4 million. Lewton pushed his team to inspire fear through suggestion rather than gore. The stories he produced," explained Bodeen, "are dramatizations of the psychology of fear…That which he cannot see fills him with basic and understandable terror." As RKO handed him one sensational title after another––I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam––he would create something unexpected. Given the title I Walked with a Zombie, for example, Lewton turned to Jane Eyre for inspiration. In the end, Lewton became a victim of his own success. Pushed to do more A-list films, he floundered, missing the improvised creativity he found in B-movies.

Born 76 years ago today in the South East of London, Michael Caine is a unique figure in the world of film. While previously actors with strong regional accents – and particularly a strong Cockney accent such as Caine’s – seemed destined to get only minor roles or become merely provincial fame, Caine became an international star in his own right. Commendably, he has never lost his accent or distinctiveness, and his personality and charisma have made him a consistent force in mainstream filmmaking for over 40 years. Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr., Caine was a filing clerk and a soldier in the Korean War (during his National Service in the British Army) before becoming a stage manager and finally an actor. After plying his trade in TV roles and movie bit parts, Caine got his breakthrough in Zulu (1964), ironically playing an upper class English officer. However, he used his true accent in subsequent 60s hits like The Ipcress File and Alfie. Caine became prolific both in Hollywood and the UK, but it was films that utilized his Britishness best – The Italian Job, Get Carter, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King – that made the biggest impact. In the 80s, Caine won a BAFTA for Educating Rita and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters, but the overall standard of the films he appeared in was patchy. In the 90s, his career was on the slide until his appearances in Little Voice and The Cider House Rules (for which he won a second Oscar) put him back on top. Caine, still working incessantly, now enjoys his status as a cultural icon (whose most famous movies, like The Italian Job, Alfie, Sleuth and Get Carter, have recently been remade, with mixed results) and a still popular actor appearing in films such as Children of Men and Christopher Nolan's rebooted Batman franchise.