JACQUES TOURNEUR

Jacques Tourneur was born in France in 1904. He appeared as an actor in a few films in the 1920s, but he became an assistant director in the early 1930s. He first worked at MGM, but later moved to RKO, where he met producer Val Lewton, and together they created a series of classic "monster movies that didn't show monsters", Cat People and its sequel, The Leopard Man, and I Walked With a Zombie. He also directed Out of the Past, the classic film noir. Tourneur passed away in 1977 at the age of 73.