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Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther (July 13, 1905 - March 7, 1981) was an American journalist, author, and a film critic for The New York Times for 27 years, where his work helped shape the careers o...view moreBosley Crowther (July 13, 1905 - March 7, 1981) was an American journalist, author, and a film critic for The New York Times for 27 years, where his work helped shape the careers of many actors, directors and screenwriters. Crowther was an advocate of foreign-language films in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.
Born Francis Bosley Crowther, Jr. in 1905 in Lutherville, Maryland, the son of Eliza (Leisenring) and Francis Bosley Crowther, he moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina as a child. There, he published a neighborhood newspaper, The Evening Star. His family then moved to Washington, D.C., and Crowther graduated from Western High School in 1922. After two years of prep school in Orange, Virginia at Woodberry Forest School, he entered Princeton University, where he majored in history. For his writing performance, Crowther was offered a job as the first cub reporter for The New York Times at a salary of $30 a week, which he eventually accepted. In 1933 he was asked by Brooks Atkinson to join the drama department and spent five years covering the theater scene in New York.
He met Florence Marks, a fellow employee, during his early years at the Times, and the couple wed on January 20, 1933. They had three sons, Bosley Crowther III, an attorney, John Crowther, a writer and artist, and Jefferson, a banker and the father of Welles Remy Crowther.
Bosley Crowther was a prolific writer of film essays as a critic for The New York Times from 1940-1967 and thereafter worked as an executive consultant at Columbia Pictures. He is also the author of The Lion’s Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire (1957), the first book documenting the history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
He died of heart failure in 1981 in Mount Kisco, New York, aged 75.view less