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Julius "Jules" Dassin (18 December 1911 – 31 March 2008), was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career. One of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. He started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian... MORE

Julius "Jules" Dassin (18 December 1911 – 31 March 2008), was an American film director, with Jewish-Russian origins. He was a subject of the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy era, and subsequently moved to France where he revived his career. One of eight children of Berthe Vogel and Samuel Dassin, a Russian-Jewish barber in Middletown, Connecticut, Dassin grew up in Harlem and went to Morris High School in the Bronx. He joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and left it after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. He started as a Yiddish actor with the ARTEF (Yiddish Proletarian Theater) company in New York. He collaborated on a film with Jack Skurnick that was incomplete because of Skurnick's early death. In 1933, he married Beatrice Launer with whom he had three children. In May 1955, he met Melina Mercouri at the Cannes Film Festival. At about the same time, he discovered the literary works of Nikos Kazantzakis. These two elements created a bond with Greece. He divorced Launer in 1962, and married Mercouri in 1966. The couple had to leave Greece after the colonels' coup in 1967. In 1970, they were accused of having financed an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship, but the LESS