Although such revered movies as Casablanca, Some Like It Hot, Psycho and are widely regarded as Hollywood classics, all of them were directed by filmmakers from Europe who went to work in the US - Michael Curtiz from Hungary, Billy Wilder from Austria, Alfred Hitchcock from England and Roman Polanski from Poland, writes Michael Dwyer.
In making her US debut with Things We Lost in the Fire, Susanne Bier is following a path forged by European directors since the silent cinema era.
There were no language barriers in movies before the advent of talking pictures, and film-making has been an international industry ever since.
Charles Chaplin left London for Hollywood in the early 1910s and made such US classics as The Kid and The Gold Rush. Rex Ingram emigrated from Dublin a few years later and directed such notable productions as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, featuring silent cinema superstar Rudolph Valentino.
Prolific Austrian actor-director Erich von Stroheim left Vienna for the US in 1909 and directed the silent classics, Greed and Queen Kelly. Swedish director Victor Sjöström made the richly atmospheric drama The Wind, starring Lillian Gish. Gifted German director FW Murnau made the supremely stylish , which collected three awards at the first Oscars ceremony in 1929.
Ernst Lubitsch, who left his native Germany in 1922, made over 20 US productions, including The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be.
Having made and M in Germany, Austrian director Fritz Lang moved to the US in the mid-1930s and made such striking films as Fury and Scarlet Street.
The great French director Jean Renoir went to the US in 1941 and received his only Oscar nomination for the 1945 film The Southerner. Versatile French filmmaker Jacques Tourneur directed such distinctive US B-movies as
Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, and the noir thriller Out of the Past.
Among the many other notable Europeans who left their mark on US cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s were William Wyler (Germany) with the Oscar-winning Ben-Hur and The Best Years of Our Lives; Austrian actor-producer-director Otto Preminger with and Anatomy of a Murder; his fellow Austrian Fred Zinnemann with High Noon and From Here to Eternity; and master German stylist Douglas Sirk with Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life.
In more recent decades, quintessentially American movies made from the perspective of European outsiders have continued to proliferate, among them such diverse pictures as Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger), Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni), Point Blank and Deliverance (John Boorman), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman), Angel Heart and Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker), Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott), Independence Day (Roland Emmerich), and The Brave One (Neil Jordan).
Unlike many of their predecessors in the first half of the 20th century, most of these directors maintained their homes in Europe when not working in the US.
