Richard Fleischer

Fleischer studied theater at Brown University and Yale before working his way up through RKO's short-subjects department, eventually earning a chance to direct features despite growing up in the shadow of his famous animator father.

Son of animation legend Max Fleischer, Richard built a career of restless genre-hopping — and directed the film that turned a two-word punchline into a permanent piece of pop culture. Despite his father's animation legacy, he worked almost exclusively in live action, directing everything from war epics to film noir to science fiction across a five-decade career.

His willingness to move fluidly between genres made him one of the more versatile studio directors of his generation, even as it meant he was rarely identified with any single genre the way some contemporaries were.