Cecil B. DeMille – 1881-1959

The son of a playwright, DeMille started his career as an actor and got into directing movies in 1914. He developed the genre of the Hollywood spectacle, which used an army of extras playing on vast movie sets to tell epic stories, often of a religious nature. His original silent versions of The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927) were seen by an estimated 800 million people. Critics did not consider DeMille a cinematic artist, but his commercial success propelled him through a 50-year career in which he directed and/or produced 70 films, culminating in his 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments. All contemporary “special effects” mega-budget Hollywood entertainments trace their ancestry to the films of “C.B.”