‘Now, Voyager’ Film Director Irving Rapper Dies at 101

Irving Rapper, the Hollywood director whose most famous film, “Now, Voyager,” included the classic, often-screened romantic scene of Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Bette Davis, is dead at 101.

Rapper, who directed Davis in four films, died Dec. 20 in Los Angeles, according to his niece, Rita Rothenberg of Long Island City, N.Y. Rapper had been a resident of the Motion Picture and Television Fund home in Woodland Hills since 1995.

Known as a director of “women’s pictures,” although he also elicited fine work from such male stars as Henreid and Fredric March, Rapper developed a strong admiration for Davis, whom he also directed in “The Corn Is Green,” “Deception” and “Another Man’s Poison.” (Some say Davis also made an uncredited cameo appearance as a nurse in Rapper’s “Shining Victory.”)

“She’s probably the most knowledgeable woman in the world. She’s certainly the most objective actress,” Rapper said of Davis for The Times in 1970. “She doesn’t give a damn what she looks like, only how well she performs. She has an inner electricity. Only once in a lifetime do you meet an actress like her. . . . She could take the most insignificant line and make it sound dynamic.”

Born in London, Rapper came to the United States as a child and studied law at New York University, where he became involved with the Washington Square Players. It was there that he moved from acting to stage managing to directing.

It was Rapper’s successful staging of the Broadway melodramatic play “Crime” that brought him to Hollywood in 1936 under contract to Warner Bros. as a dialogue coach.

Although he often chafed at the studio system, Rapper flourished under it. Of the two dozen films he directed, the nine that he made under studio aegis were far more popular and critically acclaimed than those after his departure from Warner’s in 1947.

Far from a docile studio technician, Rapper chalked up 10 suspensions at Warner’s, prompting an admiring Humphrey Bogart to suggest he would soon have enough to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

Within two years after he started coaching actors at Warner Bros., Rapper was offered scripts to direct. But he held out for A pictures, and made his film directing debut in 1941 with “Shining Victory,” which proved to be moderately successful. He went on the same year to direct “One Foot in Heaven,” which marked the director’s first popular and critical success, including a nomination for an Academy Award as best picture.

In 1942, Rapper solidified his reputation as a woman’s director with “The Gay Sisters” starring Barbara Stanwyck, and with “Now, Voyager” which would prove to be his masterpiece.

His final picture for Warner’s under his original contract was the 1947 “The Voice of the Turtle” starring Eleanor Parker and Ronald Reagan--although Rapper came to regret casting Reagan, believing that he lacked the necessary light touch for comedy. But it was the forced studio casting of Robert Alda as composer George Gershwin in the 1945 biographical picture “Rhapsody in Blue” that purportedly prompted Rapper to depart Warner’s.

The director’s best picture after that split was probably the 1956 story of a Mexican boy and a bull, “The Brave One,” which earned then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo an Oscar for best original story. Granted under Trumbo’s pseudonym Robert Rich, the Oscar went unclaimed until 1975.

Ironically, Rapper was known for his instant and often incisive casting decisions, once remarking to The Times: “How long do you have to feel cashmere to know its quality?” Yet critics believed the later films marking his long downhill slide suffered from miscasting, such as Natalie Wood in the 1958 “Marjorie Morningstar” and Carroll Baker in the 1959 “The Miracle.”

In the 1960s, Rapper moved to Italy, where he directed two largely unsuccessful biblical films, “The Story of Joseph and His Brethren” and “Pontius Pilate.”

He returned to Los Angeles in 1970, saying that he was “flattered into doing” one of his strangest projects--the life story of Christine Jorgensen, the pioneering transsexual who underwent surgery to change from a man to a woman.

“Irving, you can do no wrong,” Jorgensen wrote him. “Irving, whom the gods have sent to bring my story to the screen.”

Nevertheless, the movie fared poorly, as did Rapper’s final effort, the 1978 “Born Again,” the story of Charles “Chuck” Colson, special counsel to President Richard Nixon whose Watergate involvement led to jail time and a prison conversion to Christianity.

Rapper never directed again. In the 1980s, he could occasionally be found aboard the Queen Elizabeth II lecturing on Hollywood.