Don Siegel was educated at Cambridge University, England. In Hollywood from the mid-'30s, he began his career as an editor and second unit director. In 1945 he directed two shorts (Hitler Lives and Star in the Night) and won Academy Awards for both. His first feature as a director was 1946's The Verdict. He made his reputation in the early and mid-'50s with a series of tightly made, expertly crafted, tough but intelligent "B" pictures (among them The Lineup, Riot in Cell Block 11, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), then graduated to major "A" films in the 1960s and early 1970s. He made several "side trips" to television, mostly as a producer. Siegel directed what is generally considered to be Elvis Presley's best picture, Flaming Star. He had a long professional relationship and personal friendship with Clint Eastwood, who has often said that everything he knows about filmmaking he learned from Don Siegel.


Escape from Alcatraz (1979): $2,000,000
The Shootist (1976): $250,000

Siegel and screenwriter Stephen Geller (The Valachi Papers (1972), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)) once collaborated on a script of "The First Deadly Sin" (based on the novel), to be directed by Siegel. The project fell through, however, and a different version was filmed several years later. Was eager to direct movies as early as 1942, but his contract with Warner Brothers kept him restricted to doing editing and montage sequences. Studio chief Jack L. Warner refused to let Siegel out of his contract because he wanted to utilize his exceptional montage skills. He was asked by Richard Widmark to take over the direction of Death of a Gunfighter (1969) from original director Robert Totten. Widmark had Totten fired a week before filming was completed. Siegel finished the film, but refused credit because he felt the film was Totten's, and that he himself had contributed little. Totten refused to take credit because he had been fired. The Directors Guild allowed the two to use the pseudonym "Alan Smithee" for the first time in film history. Siegel writes about the incident in his autobiography, "A Siegel Film." In Telefon (1977), where Houston, Texas, is the location of a subplot in the story, the interior of the Hyatt Regency is not in the one in Houston but actually the one located at 5 Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, which is the same location for the disaster epic The Towering Inferno (1974). San Francisco was also the setting for three other Siegel films: The Lineup (1958), Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). During filming of Dirty Harry (1971), Siegel fell ill with the flu, and Clint Eastwood stepped in temporarily as director, during a critical scene involving a suicide jumper. This was Eastwood's first unbilled credit as director. Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 997-1001. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987. Was Sam Peckinpah's mentor. Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. He's the son of a mandolin virtuoso.