Blacklisted film director Dassin dies at 96

American film director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife Melina Mercouri starred in his hit movie 'Never On Sunday' and six more of his films, has died in Athens at 96.

The cause of his death yesterday was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only that he had been treated there for the past two weeks.

Dassin, whose more than 20 films included 'Topkapi', abandoned Hollywood during the communist blacklists in 1950.

In 1955, he won wide acclaim for 'Rififi', famous for its long raid sequence that was free of dialogue. The movie won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met Mercouri.

He married the actress-politician in 1966 and settled permanently in Athens.

Dassin directed his wife in seven films, including 'Never On Sunday', in 1960, in which she gained international notice for her portrayal of a kind-hearted prostitute.

Prime minister Costas Karamanlis paid tribute to Dassin, whom he called “a first-generation Greek”.

“Greece mourns the loss of a rare human being, a significant artist and a true friend,” Mr Karamanlis said. “His passion, his relentless creative energy, his fighting spirit and his nobility will remain unforgettable.”

After Mercouri’s death in 1994, Dassin focused on her main unrealised goal: the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin marbles from the British Museum in London to Athens.

“If there is anything I want to be remembered for it is for fulfilling Melina’s dream,” he said in 1997.

Dassin’s Hollywood credits include the wartime romance 'Reunion In France', with Joan Crawford and John Wayne (1942), the prison drama 'Brute Force' (1947) starring Burt Lancaster, and the detective thriller 'The Naked City' (1948).

Dassin’s 1974 film 'The Rehearsal' is based on the Greek student rebellions that helped bring down the 1967-74 junta, which had forced him and Mercouri into exile in Paris.

In 1980, Dassin made the Canadian-backed film 'Circle Of Two', starring Richard Burton as an aged artist with a romantic fixation on a teenage student. But Dassin was disheartened by its weak box office performance and never made another film.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut, to a Jewish barber who emigrated from Russia, Dassin was raised in working-class neighbourhoods around New York.

In 1936, he joined New York’s Yiddish Theatre and wrote adaptations of plays for radio.

After arriving in Hollywood, Dassin worked as an assistant to Alfred Hitchcock on'Mr And Mrs Smith'. A year later, he shot his first film, 'The Tell-Tale Heart', based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story. He moved on to make films at MGM, Universal and 20th Century Fox.

Dassin, who was active in left-wing political causes, was denounced by Hollywood contemporaries as being a communist enough to be placed on the infamous blacklists.

He moved to London to shoot his next film, 'Night And The City' (1950). Dassin then lived in Italy and France before returning to the cinema with 'Rififi'.

After his wife’s death, Dassin created the Melina Mercouri Foundation to continue her work. The main goal of the foundation was to push for the creation of a new Acropolis museum big enough to reunite the marbles held in the British Museum with those remaining in Greece.

After repeated delays, the glass and concrete museum at the foot of the Acropolis is set to open to the public in September – with plaster casts replacing the works displayed in London.

Dassin’s funeral arrangements were not immediately available. He had expressed a wish to be buried alongside Mercouri in central Athens’ First Cemetery.