Howard Hawks, an American producer, writer, and director, grew up in California, studied engineering, and served in the Army Air Corps during World War I. For 45 years he made movies in all of the standard Hollywood genres: popular "screwball comedies" like His Girl Friday (1940) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), westerns like Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959), musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), gangster films like Scarface (1932), adventure films like To Have and Have Not (1944), and private-eye melodramas like The Big Sleep (1946). These were not run-of-the-mill movies, however, for Hawks infused them with his own style and themes. He tended to use a symmetrical structure and sparse dialogue, depending on concrete visual images to reveal character in action. Although he worked with some of the best writers in Hollywood (Ben Hecht, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner, for example), he allowed his actors to add or alter lines, believing that improvisation improved the verisimilitude of a film. Hawks received only one Academy Award nomination in his career, for Sergeant York (1941), but he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy in 1975.
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