In conjunction with the film version, a new paperback edition of Imitation of Life hit bookstores, selling half a million copies.

The same year Imitation of Life hit movie theatres and became a best seller all over again, the book's inspiration, Zora Neale Hurston, died forgotten and penniless in Florida.

A year after the film came out, Brazilian television presented a telenovella based on the book.

Helping boost the success of Imitation of Life was the studio's unprecedented decision to release it simultaneously to both white and black theatres in the South. At the time, Hollywood didn't release films to black theatres until they had played out in other markets. A demographic study of the film audience in 1960 surprised executives by revealing that 30 percent of the audience for movies was African-American.

The Douglas Sirk revival started in 1968 when film critic Andrew Sarris placed him in his second ranking of directors, just behind such geniuses as Orson Welles and Charles Chaplin, in The American Cinema. This was followed by major attention in academic film journals and retrospectives at film festivals.

As recently as 1995, readers of the New York Daily News voted Imitation of Life a place among their ten favorite films.

Among the directors citing Sirk as an influence on their own work are John Waters and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Waters featured references to the film in both Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977).

Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven (2002), starring Julianne Moore, is a pastiche of scenes and themes from Sirk's films.

by Frank Miller