Walter Wanger

Walter Wanger, born July 11, 1894, in San Francisco, California (United States), died November 18, 1968, in New York City, was an American producer. A prestigious producer, from the very beginning, Walter Wanger offered major roles to major female stars (Helen Morgan in Applause, Tallulah Bankhea... More

Walter Wanger, born July 11, 1894, in San Francisco, California (United States), died November 18, 1968, in New York City, was an American producer. A prestigious producer, from the very beginning, Walter Wanger offered major roles to major female stars (Helen Morgan in Applause, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Sylvia Sydney), also producing Lang's I Have the Right to Live with Henry Fonda and John Ford's Stagecoach with John Wayne, Frank Borzage, William Dieterle, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jacques Tourneur. Wanger collaborated with Joan Bennett in 1936 on Walsh's Fingerprints with Cary Grant. Two years later, Wanger cast the bombshell Hedy Lamarr in his first American film, Casbah. In 1940, in Tay Garnett's The Woman with the Blonde Cigarettes, he redefined the (brunette) image of Joan Bennett, who would become his wife that same year. In 1945, he introduced another brunette, Yvonne De Carlo, to the spotlight in The Loves of Salome. He offered Bennett, among other films, Red Street and The Desperate. He also produced Joan of Arc, starring the blonde Ingrid Bergman, and Anthony Mann's The Black Book. In 1951, when he was on the verge of bankruptcy, he suspected his wife of adultery with her talent agent, Jennings Lang. In a Beverly Hills parking lot on December 13, he shot and wounded Lang; the scandal made headlines in the local press, and Bennett considered divorce. Wanger was sentenced to four months in prison at Castaic Honor Farm. He returned to filmmaking the following year, subsequently producing The Adventures of Hadji, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I Want to Live!, which earned redhead Susan Hayward an Oscar. In 1963, the sinking of the Cleopatra largely ruined him. In 1965, Bennett filed for divorce. He died of a heart attack in 1968.