American-born film director Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) rose to prominence in the 1950s with such films as Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and his best-known work, Rebel Without a Cause, which transformed leading man James Dean into an American icon. He often portrayed the sensitive, troubled outsider, a heroic figure thwarted by life and love in a dysfunctional postwar society. Although he directed more than 20 feature films between 1948 and his death in 1979, Ray's most critically acclaimed works were made between 1952 and 1955.

Trained in Theater

Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle on August 7, 1911, in the Wisconsin town of Galesville, near La Crosse. Suspended from high school on several occasions, he nonetheless showed himself to be a gifted and intelligent teen and was accepted to the University of Chicago in 1930, the same year he married a young woman named Jean Evans.

Reconfiguring his name as Nicholas Ray, he attended college...