John Sturges

In 1945 he married Dorothy Lynn Brooks, a secretary at Warner Bros. The couple had two children, a son, Michael Eliot Sturges and a daughter, Deborah Lynn Sturges Wyle. The couple later divorced.

He got married for a second time to Katherine Helena Soules, his fishing partner in 1984.

He suffered from chronic emphysema and on August 18, 1992, at the age of 82 years, he succumbed to a heart attack in San Luis Obispo in California.

He was born John Eliot Crane on January 3, 1910, in Oak Park, Illinois, US as the third child and second son of Reginald G. R. Carne and his wife Grace Delafield Sturges.

His English-born father was a real estate developer and banker who relocated with family to Southern California and established the Bank of Ojai when John was only two-year-old.

When John was around five-year-old his father’s alcoholism led to domestic problems that finally resulted in divorce of their parents following which his mother shifted to a small house in Santa Monica with the children.

Thereafter he and his siblings were raised by his mother. John later adopted his mother’s family name, which she reclaimed back after divorce, and used it all through his adult life.

Amidst the financial hurdles that the mother and her children faced, John Sturges remained content with outdoor activities that he enjoyed all through his growing years, which included shooting his BB gun, riding ostriches, building wireless receivers and racing soapboxes.

With the help of his brother Sturges Carne, who was working as art director in the RKO Studios, Sturges joined RKO in 1932 as assistant art director in the blueprint and art departments.

In 1934 he helped Robert Edmond Jones to bring three-strip Technicolor at RKO and the eventual success of films like ‘The Garden of Allah’ and ‘Becky Sharp’ led to his promotion as colour consultant.

He then worked as an apprentice in the studio’s editing department for four years. Moving forward he stepped as second unit director of his mentor, director George Stevens’ adventure film ‘Gunga Din’ (1939) that became a huge success.

The films ‘They Knew What They Wanted’ (1940) and ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ (1941) both directed by Garson Kanin saw him working as the prime editor.

He directed around 45 documentary films for the U.S. Army Air Corps and intelligence that were based in California, Culver City, Dayton and Ohio during the ‘Second World War’ when he served as a Captain in the Army. The documentaries were shown to the troops and among these the most notable was ‘Thunderbolt’ (1945), a 43 minutes film that he made along with director William Wyler. This colour classic that was released in theatres after two years earned him a Bronze Star.

In 2008 ‘University of Wisconsin Press’ published ‘Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges’, by Glenn Lovell.