Nicholas Ray's directing career encompassed only 20 feature films over a period of 15 years from the late 1940s to the early 60s. He might have remained only a small, idiosyncratic chapter in mainstream Hollywood history, known today primarily as James Dean's director in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but his lasting reputation was secured first through his "discovery" by the French and later American auteurist critics ("Nick Ray is cinema," Jean-Luc Godard wrote), and then by his being adopted as an icon and inspiration to a new generation of international artists and filmmakers of the 1970s and after. But Nick Ray's enduring impact lies in more than mere critical fashion. A filmmaker of dynamic visual excitement and profound humanism, he also had a reputation in Hollywood as an iconoclastic loner, along with a self-destructive bent that gave him an air of romantic tragedy not unlike some of his characters. Although his best film work was done in the 1940s and 50s, it has been said that in his radical political and social sensibility, Nicholas Ray was a creature of both the 30s and the 60s, and ahead of his time in both decades.

He was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle (later dropping the surname and reversing his two given names) in Wisconsin in 1911, and attended the same high school as another future filmmaker, Joseph Losey. As early as his teens, he was writing and producing radio programs. He studied architecture and was invited by Frank Lloyd Wright to join the utopian Taliesin community in 1931; although that venture lasted only a few months, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted that the experience in architecture gave him "a respect for the horizontal line that was central to Ray's subsequent affinity for CinemaScope" - an assertion made by Ray himself.

He landed in New York in the early 1930s and became involved in the leftist political and cultural movement of the time, bringing him into contact with such theater artists as Elia Kazan and fostering an interest in southern folk and populist music. He began working on a weekly radio show in the early 40s, leading to an association with producer John Houseman and the Voice of America. The connections to Kazan and Houseman were significant. Ray claimed to have learned filmmaking by shadowing Kazan through every step of the process of Kazan's work on his first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). And Houseman gave Ray his first directing boost by producing his debut feature, the tenderly tragic and compellingly styled They Live by Night, filmed in 1947 but not released until 1949, thanks to the chaotic shifting of power at RKO to new owner Howard Hughes. (Based on Edward Anderson's acclaimed novel, it was remade under its original name, Thieves Like Us, by Robert Altman in 1974.)

They Live by Night brought considerable attention to Ray as a brilliant young director on the rise, and he was hired to work with no less than Humphrey Bogart for his next picture, Knock on Any Door (1949). It turned out to be a heavy-handed social drama of the type Warner Brothers turned out in the 30s, but with little of that era's primitive dynamism, and it did little for Ray's career. He followed it with a quirky melodrama, A Woman's Secret (1949), notable for its complex, engrossing female characters. It was one of the few films of its time to focus on a central relationship between two women, but is largely forgotten today. It is notable, however, for being the project on which he met actress Gloria Grahame. The two wed in Las Vegas immediately after shooting wrapped; their stormy marriage ended in 1952. Eight years later, Grahame married Ray's son Anthony, a producer and actor who appeared as one of the Younger brothers under his father's direction in The True Story of Jesse James (1957).

Ray and Grahame, their marriage already on the rocks, teamed again, along with Bogart in one of his best screen performances, for the emotionally wrenching noir "romance" In a Lonely Place (1950). This story of a troubled relationship and an unstable writer at odds with the Hollywood milieu in which he lives and works is often seen as one of Ray's most personal and darkly confessional works. The moody, disturbing tone of the picture cast Ray as an ideal film noir director, and in the next two years, he would turn out a few more prime examples of the genre: Born to Be Bad (1950), in which he unearthed an element of vicious danger beneath Joan Fontaine's ladylike poise, and On Dangerous Ground (1952), a crime drama with a hardened, violent cop reclaiming his humanity as the focus. Both films starred Robert Ryan, with whom Ray was to work five times, including a war film sandwiched between the two noir ventures, Flying Leathernecks (1951), with John Wayne as the top-lined star.

Ray and Ryan worked together again briefly on another film noir whose direction is credited to John Cromwell, The Racket (1951). This was one of several projects on which Ray did uncredited patch-up work for Hughes's RKO in the 50s, among them Roseanna McCoy (1949), Macao (1952), and Androcles and the Lion (1952). It has been claimed that Ray's performance of this valuable service to the studio protected him from the Hollywood Blacklist, despite his radical political associations. It certainly helped him gain enough clout to begin moving toward becoming his own independent producer. The Racket and Macao are also notable for Ray's first association with Robert Mitchum, the star of his next picture and one of his most acclaimed, The Lusty Men (1952).

Set among the world of the rodeo, the movie was not really an action picture or a Western, Ray later said, but a story about people who want to own a home of their own, "the great American search at the time this film was made," he explained. He also noted that when shooting began, only 26 pages of script existed. The bulk of the screenplay was written nightly, bringing a rawness to the "instinct and reactions among the actors." It remains one of his most effective and best-loved films, and the sequence of Mitchum striding through the rubbish-strewn, abandoned rodeo arena in shadowy late daylight, a segment that sent the French critics of the time into rhapsodies, is one of the justly celebrated moments in American cinema.

Ray's critical reputation was furthered by two subsequent movies, the bizarre, feverish 1954 Western Johnny Guitar (a parable of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the day), and the classic teen angst drama Rebel Without a Cause. In between fell the rarely seen offbeat Western Run for Cover (aka Colorado, 1955). Johnny Guitar is certainly one of the most singular, distinctive works of both Ray's career and its era - a dreamlike story of jealousy and vengeance with a passive male title character and two central female roles: Vienna, the imperious, masculine saloon keeper played by an almost Gorgon-like Joan Crawford (who battled with everyone involved in the production) and rancher Emma Small, a role that tiny Mercedes McCambridge attacked with a savage zeal. Startlingly bold in its use of color, it's a film that's hard to categorize and equally hard to forget.

Rebel Without a Cause is still probably Ray's most famous work, thanks largely to its connection with the legend of James Dean and an alienated youth culture that the star and film helped greatly to romanticize. Here the sense of place Ray brought with him from his architecture days- Jim's stifling home, the planetarium, the hollow mansion to which the three youthful leads escape- has a huge bearing on the characters' lives and relationships. And the central trio - rebel Jim, bad girl Judy and lost boy Plato - plays out as a longing for family and community away from the harsh, confining strictures of 1950s middle-class suburbia, that made the film, and Ray, a touchstone for the youthful counter-culture that would emerge in the years to come.

Ray's next film, the musical melodrama Hot Blood (1956), while not a successful project and seldom discussed today, continued his fascination with non-mainstream cultures and communities (in this case, it was gypsies). He followed that with an even more damning look at suburban middle-class complacency and conformity than Rebel Without a Cause, in which a normal All-American husband and father becomes a monster under the influence of the newly discovered "miracle" drug cortisone. Bigger Than Life (1956) was based on a magazine article that intrigued both Ray and producer-star James Mason, offering the actor one of his best roles, despite script problems attributed to Ray's indecision about where the story was heading. The troubled production marked an early stage of what would come to be known as Ray's "difficulty," contributing both to his eventual downfall in Hollywood and his reputation for free-spirited rebelliousness and willful self-destruction.

Another Western followed, The True Story of Jesse James, a studio assignment far more commercial than Johnny Guitar. But his next films veered farther away from the system, as studios became less eager to employ him and his attention turned to highly personal projects. The Hollywood lifestyle, he later said, did not allow him to do things the way he wanted to. "It's very tempting, very easy to compromise," he said. "And if you turn it down a couple times, you're 'difficult'." Subsequent projects roamed through a number of genres, creating a series of films that, although not widely known today, have been praised as among his finest work: Bitter Victory (1957), a pessimistic and subversive war film; Wind Across the Everglades (1958), an unusual story pitting a conservationist against a poacher with an unconventional cast featuring Christopher Plummer in his second feature role, Burl Ives and former burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee; the violent noir romance Party Girl (1958), which managed to extract some excitement from two of Hollywood's most wooden performers, Robert Taylor and Cyd Charisse; and The Savage Innocents (1959), with Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole, in his film debut, in a story of an Eskimo on the run from the law.

Ray's cinematic prospects in the early sixties, like some of his contemporaries in the business, unfortunately led to big Hollywood epics, a trend at the time. Although he seems a most unlikely artist for depicting the life of Christ on-screen, critics found several unmistakable Nick Ray moments in King of Kings (1961). On the financially troubled 55 Days at Peking (1963), Ray quarreled violently with producer Samuel Bronston, alienating a powerful and former supporter of his work. And then he suffered a severe heart attack at only 52, the victim of years of hard living. He was replaced on 55 Days at Peking and never directed another feature film.

But Nicholas Ray didn't disappear from sight. Saved from oblivion by a new generation of film critics and artists, he taught for a time at the State University of New York, where he and his students collaborated on We Can't Go Home Again (1976), a work closely connected to the more "experimental" school of performance art cinema with thematic and stylistic threads leading back to the earliest years of his career. Ray, who made his first on-screen appearance in the final shot of Rebel Without a Cause and took a small part in 55 Days at Peking, had by this time become a performer on and off screen, mostly in the role he was born to play - Nick Ray, the wise, difficult, revered artist derailed by a suffocating industry and his own wanton impulses. German director Wim Wenders used this image to enrich his noirish thriller The American Friend (1977), casting Ray as a famous painter who fakes his own death so he can turn out "newly discovered" masterpieces and sell them for a premium. Wenders and Ray then collaborated on the hybrid performance/documentary Lightning Over Water (1980), which chronicles Ray's last days as he succumbs to brain cancer. He died before the film was completed, just short of 68 years old.

By Rob Nixon