Biography

Born in Paris, Tourneur went to Hollywood with his father, director Maurice Tourneur around 1913. He started out as a script clerk and editor for his father, then graduated to such jobs as directing shorts (often with the pseudonym Jack Turner), both in France and America. He was hired to run the second unit for David O. Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities (1935), where he first met Val Lewton. In 1942, when Lewton was named to head the new horror unit at RKO, he asked Tourneur to be his first director. The result was the highly artistic (and commercially successful) Cat People (1942). Tourneur went on to direct masterpieces in many different genres, all showing a great command of mood and atmosphere.
- IMDb mini biography by: Ken Yousten <kyousten@bev.net>

The staircase in Cat People was borrowed from The Magnificent Ambersons.

He has directed two films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Cat People (1942) and Out of the Past (1947).

Son of Maurice Tourneur

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1098-1103. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Largely, I hate doing television; it's horrible. It's against everything I believe in; if you don't bring some of your individuality and some of your experience and sensitivity to bear on a subject, you don't get more than a mechanical result.