Throughout his extraordinary career as a director, John Frankenheimer continuously made an outstanding contribution to the art of filmmaking through the exacting care and integrity he brought to his work and his mastery of all the elements of directing.

Mr. Frankenheimer directed many films which expressed his views on important social and philosophical topics. Birdman of Alcatraz and The Fixer explore the indomitability of the human spirit. Seven Days in May details the anatomy of a United States military coup. The Manchurian Candidate is an indictment of the McCarthy era. The Train questions whether a work of art is more valuable than a human life. Black Sunday and Year of the Gun confront one of the modern world's most distressing dilemmas, international terrorism. To make his films, Mr. Frankenheimer took cameras from the slums of New York to the plains of Afghanistan. He directed exceptional performances of actors as varied as Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Hackman, Samuel L. Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Warren Beatty, Sharon Stone and Robert DeNiro.

Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York, grew up in the borough of Queens, and was schooled at LaSalle Military Academy and Williams College. His first experience making movies came in the Air Force, when he directed documentaries while stationed in Burbank, California. In 1953, he found work at CBS-TV in New York as an assistant director. Within a year and a half of his discharge, he was one of the two directors of the weekly Climax! dramatic series, and soon after directed 42 episodes of the now famous Playhouse 90 anthology series. Between Playhouse 90 and two other anthology showcases, Mr. Frankenheimer directed 152 live television dramas between 1954 and 1960, and received six Emmy nominations. One of the major contributors to the Golden Age of Television, his work during that period included The Comedian, starring Mickey Rooney, the original Days of Wine and Roses, with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie, The Turn of the Screw, starring Ingrid Bergman, and Sir John Gielgud's first television appearance in The Browning Version.

Mr. Frankenheimer turned to the big screen in 1956 with the theatrical version of one of his television dramas, The Young Stranger. His next film, The Young Savages, was a realistic urban drama about life in East Harlem, starring Burt Lancaster. Mr. Frankenheimer's reputation as a world-class filmmaker was firmly established with his third film, Birdman of Alcatraz, for which star Burt Lancaster, and his co-stars Thelma Ritter and Telly Savalas, received Oscar® nominations.

His next picture was All Fall Down, starring Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint. That same year The Manchurian Candidate was released. It became the prototype for an entire genre of psychological spy thrillers and remains a terrifying, nightmarish tale of psychological intrigue to this day. Mr. Frankenheimer's next film, Seven Days in May, a large-scale tale of political suspense, has also become a modern-day classic.

Notable films over the next few years included The Train, Grand Prix, Seconds, The Fixer, The Gypsy Moths, and the widely praised American Film Theater production of The Iceman Cometh. These were followed by such action-adventure films as French Connection II, Black Sunday, and the thriller 52 Pick-Up. Later in his career, Mr. Frankenheimer directed Ronin, starring Robert DeNiro, and the suspense thriller Reindeer Games, starring Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron.

In the 1990s, Mr. Frankenheimer returned to television and directed four television movies: Against the Wall and The Burning Season for HBO, followed by Andersonville and George Wallace for TNT. He won Emmy Awards for all of them.