Beginning in 1952 when the Cecil B. deMille Award was presented to its namesake visionary director, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has awarded its most prestigious prize 66 times. From Walt Disney to Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor to Steven Spielberg and 62 others, the DeMille has gone to luminaries – actors, directors, producers – who have left an indelible mark on Hollywood. Sometimes mistaken with a career achievement award, per HFPA statute, the DeMille is more precisely bestowed for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment”. In this series, longtime Golden Globes voter Philip Berk profiles DeMille laureates through the years.

When Cecil B. deMille was approached by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to name our lifetime achievement award in his honor he graciously welcomed the idea.

Up until then, he had never been honored with any award. Although 63 years after the Cannes Film Festival was canceled in 1939 in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, his landmark film Union Pacific was awarded the Palme d’Or. And DeMille fully deserved that belated recognition.

Sadly, even today he is more recognized as a showman than a filmmaker, forgetting that during the silent era, his name was coupled with D.W. Griffith as the true geniuses of silent film. His acclaim began with The Squaw Man, which he single-handedly cobbled together despite working in a medium he knew only about from watching films.

At its first screening, it was deemed a total loss, but after it was discovered that the problem was its sprockets, and that hurdle was crossed, the film became a critical and box office hit and set in motion a production company, first named Lasky Goldwyn DeMille which merged with Paramount Famous Players to become Hollywood’s most successful movie studio, Paramount Pictures.

The director who had gone West (the DeMilles were originally from Massachusetts) to try his luck in the emerging industry, was soon making five movies a year, and before his fortieth birthday, he was a multimillionaire. At first, he resisted sound, but once he mastered the medium, he became the most commercially successful filmmaker of the 20th century.

During his lifetime he cultivated the image of a patrician, conservative, Christian fundamentalist, but in truth, his mother came from an Orthodox Sephardic Jewish family. She had no qualms about marrying her Episcopalian husband and welcomed being disowned by her family, but ironically her granddaughter Agnes deMille, one of the geniuses of the American theatre, would later proclaim proudly that she was the only deMille who had inherited her grandmother’s Semitic nose.

Cecil’s brother William (the father of Agnes) was also a film director, but his claim to fame rests on his daughter Agnes’s genius, whose masterpieces include Copland’s Rodeo, Morton Gould’s Fall Fiver Legend, and the ballets she created for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Carousel, which revolutionized the American musical theatre.

Cecil’s devotion to his mother continued throughout her life. She was the mainstay of his upbringing, his father having died when he was twelve, and she exerted enormous influence until her death at 70.

After the success of The Squaw Man, Cecil kept Paramount afloat with hit after hit, so that by the time he was forty he was one of the richest men in America, worth in excess of $10 million, most of it invested in stock. Unfortunately, when the market crashed he was almost wiped out, but he soon weathered that storm. By sparing no expense to the studio, he was responsible for Paramount’s top moneymakers for the next 50 years. His silent masterpieces which include The Ten Commandments, The King of Kings and The Cheat assure him a place alongside D.W. Griffith, and with the advent of sound, again it was the biblical epic that consumed him, and his showmanship guaranteed Paramount that every deMille movie would be the year’s top money earner.

His first sound film The Sign of the Cross made stars of Claudette Colbert and Charles Laughton and was a huge success. He had discovered Laughton on the London stage and brought him to Hollywood. His next blockbuster two years later, Cleopatra, did even better, still remembered for Colbert’s goat’s milk bath sequence.

The following year he gave us The Crusades, the year after that The Plainsman, and a year later The Buccaneer. Union Pacific, the belated winner of the Palme D’Or, was the film he was most proud of, a patriotic retelling of the meeting of the Central Pacific and the Union railroads which united the West and East coasts. It celebrated America.

Northwest Mounted Police, his first film in Technicolor and his second with Gary Cooper followed, and again proved the year’s biggest attraction. Two years later following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he had his biggest success with Reap the Wild Wind, which featured a spectacular giant squid sequence that had audiences lining the block. Two years later as a patriotic gesture he then made The Story of Dr. Wassell, his least typical film, a tribute to a World War 2 hero, which still made money, no doubt because superstar Gary Cooper played the doctor. After a three-year break, he came back with possibly his worst movie Unconquered in which Paulette Goddard played a white slave and Gary Cooper her slave owner, his only movie that lost money. Maybe deMille had learned a lesson, and he waited another two years before unleashing the movie that would become the template for all future deMille epics, his signature combination of sex and religion. Even though movie attendance had dropped off astronomically it never impacted a DeMille picture. Samson and Delilah became his biggest success, grossing three times that of its nearest competitor.

Throughout his career DeMille had always insisted on absolute control. Do it his way or the highway. He had run-ins with his costume designers, his art directors, and his writers, but the formula worked, and finally, in 1952 he achieved his first Oscar nominee and winner.

In a year when everyone assumed the best picture awards would go to High Noon, both the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Academy went with The Greatest Show on Earth. In retrospect it’s a credible choice, a sprawling circus movie with an all-star cast, climaxed by a spectacular train derailment, featuring James Stewart as a clown. And of course, the public ate it up, but Hollywood’s liberals were incensed. For them, this recognition was an affirmation of the Blacklist. They hadn’t forgotten C.B.’s red-baiting throughout the 1940s. And were incensed when High Noon’s screenwriter Carl Foreman, who later exiled himself to England, was denied his award.

But by now CB was in his seventies, living just long enough to complete one last movie. Little did he know his remake of The Ten Commandments, would become his most famous movie, a TV ratings bonanza which audiences thrill to every year around Easter week. It offered the same old sex and religion, but it had the imprint of DeMille, which no one has ever been able to replicate since try as they may.

Besides being a film pioneer and a visionary director, DeMille was always a shameless self-promoter. His voice sometimes mistaken for the Voice of God boomed out to audiences. He narrated many of his films and he became a household word when he produced the top radio show Lux Radio Theater. As a staunch believer in the American way of life, he espoused virtue, yet throughout his life, he had adulterous affairs with his female assistants, trusted scriptwriters and film editors.

He was one of a kind, who left his vast estate to his natural daughter totally cutting out his three adopted children including sometime actress Katharine deMille. His estranged son-in-law Anthony Quinn, who was once married to Katharine, wrote in his autobiography about his last visit with a fatally ill DeMille: “I got up to leave. I said, ‘You know in Europe I learned a nice thing. Men hug each other in saying goodbye.’ I took the frail man in my arms. He made a feeble attempt to hug me. In that minute out of twenty-odd years we became father and son. And I still love him deeply for that minute when he was in my arms.”

We are grateful that he allowed us to name our lifetime achievement award after him, and we treasure the beautiful letters he wrote to mark that occasion. (see below)