Motion Picture Director. A leading figure of television's "Golden Age" in the 1950s, he won a Best Director Academy Award for his big screen debut, "Marty" (1955). Adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his teleplay, this low-budget tale of a Bronx butcher who unexpectedly finds love also scored Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Ernest Borgnine), and Screenplay. It became an international hit and was the first American film to win the Golden Palm at Cannes. Mann was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1941. After serving as a B-24 pilot during World War II, he studied drama at Yale and entered television as a floor manager at NBC in New York. From 1949 he directed over 100 live episodes of "Philco-Goodyear Playhouse", including the original version of "Marty" (starring Rod Steiger, 1953) and Chayefsky's "The Bachelor Party" (1953), which he filmed in 1957. "Marty" would remain the high point of Mann's career. Critics felt his visual style was rather stagy and his output was an uneven mix of literary adaptations and genre pictures; but he was uncommonly good with actors and continued to do fine work in films and television through the 1980s. Among his credits are the features "Desire Under the Elms" (1958), "Seperate Tables" (1958), "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1960), "Lover Come Back" (1961), "The Outsider" (1961), "That Touch of Mink" (1962), "A Gathering of Eagles" (1963), "Quick Before It Melts" (1965), "Fitzwilly" (1967), "Kidnapped" (1971), "Birch Interval" (1976), and "Night Crossing" (1982), and the TV movies "Heidi" (1968), "David Copperfield" (1970), "Jane Eyre" (1971), and "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1979). Mann died in Los Angeles. He was not related to director (and contemporary) Daniel Mann.