---
name: "Henry Koster"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/henry-koster"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "1 May 1905"
died: "21 September 1988"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 3
average_fi1m_score: 65
average_as: "director"
average_over: 3
updated: "2026-09-20T02:35:55.304088+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Henry Koster

Director. Born 1 May 1905 in Berlin, Germany. Died 21 September 1988.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 1 May 1905, Berlin, Germany
- **Died:** 21 September 1988
- **Active:** 1936–1953
- **Also known as:** Hermann Kosterlitz
- **Frequently works with:** [Deanna Durbin](https://film.one/person/deanna-durbin.md), [Joe Pasternak](https://film.one/person/joe-pasternak.md)
- **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar nomination
- **Average Fi1m score:** 65, as director, over 3 titles
- **Fi1m score by decade:** 1930s 72 (1), 1940s 74 (1), 1950s 48 (1)
- **Score spread:** 0 at 80+, 2 at 60–79, 1 under 60
- **Genres:** Comedy 2, Drama 2, Romance 2, Fantasy 1, History 1, Music 1
- **Screen time:** 5 hours of reviewed films
- **Box office:** $36m across 1 films with figures
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Koster, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q61859, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0467396/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/33064

## Streaming the US now

- **Pluto TV:** [*The Bishop's Wife*](https://film.one/film/the-bishops-wife.md) (74)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Henry Koster

> Henry Koster made films that do not look directed: family comedies and musicals in which the camera waits and the actors relax into being liked. With Deanna Durbin or James Stewart, that is a real skill. Later, the sweetness took over.

Nothing in a Henry Koster film tells you a director was there. The camera sits at a comfortable distance, the lighting is kind, and the scene belongs to whoever is talking, usually a young person with more sense than the adults around her. In *Three Smart Girls* (1936), his first American film, three sisters cross the Atlantic to stop their father marrying a woman half his age, and that plot is all there is. What Koster adds is patience. He puts Deanna Durbin, fourteen, in front of the camera and does not hurry her, and the film is pleasant because she is.

That was the method for thirty years, and it began somewhere else. Koster wrote scripts in Berlin from the mid-1920s and directed his first feature, *Thea Roland*, in 1932. He left Germany in 1933, worked in France and Hungary, and arrived in Hollywood in 1936 alongside the producer Joe Pasternak, with whom he would make eight films. At Universal the pair built a run of musicals around Durbin, six in all, starting with *Three Smart Girls* and *One Hundred Men and a Girl* (1937). Later he moved to MGM and Fox: *The Bishop's Wife* (1947), a Christmas fantasy; *Harvey* (1950), with James Stewart and a rabbit nobody else can see; and *The Robe* (1953), the first feature shot in CinemaScope. His last film was *The Singing Nun* in 1966.

Actors liked him, and it shows. "I found out that the best acting comes out of complete relaxation, not out of complete tension," he said, and his sets were known for it. Stewart made five films with him, and *Harvey* has lasted because Koster lets him take it at his own pace. We came to *Three Smart Girls* expecting to sit through a thin story politely and found we were smiling at the sisters for most of its 84 minutes, which is the whole of the trick: the company is good because nobody on screen looks as though they are working.

The cost is that there is not much else. Critics have long filed Koster as a reliable studio hand rather than a director with a signature, and the description is fair; his style is invisible by design, and invisibility is not a point of view. He liked, in his own words, stories "a little pixie-ish, a little fairytale-like", with a family feeling and a moral, often carried by a church or a concert hall. By the 1960s the reviews were finding that the sweetness had got the upper hand, and *Flower Drum Song* (1961) and *The Singing Nun* are the films most often held against him.

Start with the Durbin years, and stop some way short of the nuns.

## Biography

Henry Koster, born Hermann Kosterlitz, was a German-born film director who worked in Europe and Hollywood. He was born on 1 May 1905 in Berlin and died on 21 September 1988 in Camarillo, California.

Koster directed his first film, the comedy *Thea Roland*, in Berlin in 1932. After leaving Germany in the early 1930s, he worked in France and Hungary before signing with Universal Pictures. His first American film, *Three Smart Girls* (1936), was a commercial success that helped revive the studio and launched a series of Deanna Durbin musicals.

Among his later credits are *The Bishop's Wife* (1947), *Harvey* (1950), *No Highway in the Sky* (1951), *O. Henry's Full House* (1952), *My Cousin Rachel* (1952), *The Robe* (1953), *Désirée* (1954) and *The Story of Ruth* (1960). He also directed *Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation* (1962) and *The Inspector General* (1949).

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, catalog.afi.com.*

## On Fi1m (3)

- *The Robe* (1953), Fi1m 48, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/the-robe.md)
- *The Bishop's Wife* (1947), Fi1m 74, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/the-bishops-wife.md)
- *Three Smart Girls* (1936), Fi1m 72, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/three-smart-girls.md)

## Complete filmography (81)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *Unwanted Cinema* (2005), Actor
- *Eine Handvoll Helden* (1967), Writer
- *The Singing Nun* (1966), Director
- *Dear Brigitte* (1965), Director, Producer
- *Take Her, She's Mine* (1963), Director, Producer
- *Marilyn* (1963), Director
- *Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation* (1962), Director
- *Flower Drum Song* (1961), Director
- *The Story of Ruth* (1960), Director
- *The Naked Maja* (1958), Director
- *Fraulein* (1958), Director
- *My Man Godfrey* (1957), Director
- *The Power and the Prize* (1956), Director
- *D-Day the Sixth of June* (1956), Director
- *Good Morning, Miss Dove* (1955), Director
- *The Virgin Queen* (1955), Director
- *A Man Called Peter* (1955), Director
- *Désirée* (1954), Director
- *The Robe* (1953), Director — Fi1m 48, [page](https://film.one/film/the-robe.md)
- *My Cousin Rachel* (1952), Director
- *Stars and Stripes Forever* (1952), Director
- *O. Henry's Full House* (1952), Director
- *Elopement* (1951), Director
- *Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell* (1951), Director
- *No Highway in the Sky* (1951), Director
- *Harvey* (1950), Director
- *My Blue Heaven* (1950), Director
- *Wabash Avenue* (1950), Director
- *The Inspector General* (1949), Director
- *Come to the Stable* (1949), Director
- *The Luck of the Irish* (1948), Director
- *The Bishop's Wife* (1947), Director — Fi1m 74, [page](https://film.one/film/the-bishops-wife.md)
- *The Unfinished Dance* (1947), Director
- *Two Sisters from Boston* (1946), Director
- *Music for Millions* (1944), Director
- *Between Us Girls* (1942), Director, Producer
- *It Started with Eve* (1941), Director
- *Spring Parade* (1940), Director
- *First Love* (1939), Director, Producer
- *Three Smart Girls Grow Up* (1939), Director
- *The Rage of Paris* (1938), Director, Producer
- *One Hundred Men and a Girl* (1937), Director
- *Farewell Again* (1937), Writer
- *Three Smart Girls* (1936), Director — Fi1m 72, [page](https://film.one/film/three-smart-girls.md)
- *Catherine the Last* (1936), Director
- *Affairs of Maupassant* (1935), Director, Writer
- *The Ugly Girl* (1935), Director
- *The Crosspatch* (1935), Director
- *Little Mother* (1935), Director
- *Ball at the Savoy* (1935), Writer
- *Peter* (1934), Director
- *The Switched Bride* (1934), Writer
- *The Double* (1934), Screenplay
- *Der Tunnel* (1933), Screenplay
- *Toto* (1933), Screenplay
- *The Private Secretary Gets Married* (1933), Director, Writer
- *Weaker Sex* (1933), Writer
- *The Rebel* (1932), Writer
- *Married by the Stork* (1932), Director
- *Happy Hearts* (1932), Screenplay
- *There Goes the Bride* (1932), Story
- *Five from the Jazzband* (1932), Writer
- *Stamboul* (1931), Screenplay
- *Who Takes Love Seriously?* (1931), Writer
- *Frivolous youth* (1931), Writer
- *His girlfriend Annette* (1931), Writer
- *The Indictment* (1931), Writer
- *The Man Who Committed the Murder* (1931), Screenplay
- *The Man Who Killed* (1931), Screenplay
- *Woman in the Jungle* (1931), Dialogue
- *Une femme a menti* (1930), Adaptation
- *The Last Company* (1930), Writer
- *Das letzte Fort* (1929), Screenplay
- *Sündig und süß* (1929), Writer
- *Liebfraumilch* (1929), Writer
- *Sündenfall* (1929), Screenplay
- *Eins + Eins = Drei* (1927), Writer
- *Children's Souls Accuse You* (1927), Screenplay, Writer
- *Prinz Louis Ferdinand* (1927), Writer
- *Orphan of Lowood* (1926), Writer
- *Il diario di una donna amata*, Director

## Gallery

- ![Henry Koster](https://film.one/media/person/1229552/gallery-89afcefb7019.jpg) Henry Koster — Universal-International, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Flower_Drum_Song_%281961%29_Press_Photo_of_Henry_Koster_%28cropped%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Press photo of Henry Koster and Miyoshi Umeki for the 1961 film Flower Drum Song](https://film.one/media/person/1229552/gallery-8a760edff138.jpg) Press photo of Henry Koster and Miyoshi Umeki for the 1961 film Flower Drum Song — Universal-International, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Flower_Drum_Song_%281961%29_Press_Photo_of_Henry_Koster_and_Miyoshi_Umeki.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Press photo of (from left) Nancy Kwan, Henry Koster, and Jack Soo (back) for the 1961 film Flower Drum Song](https://film.one/media/person/1229552/gallery-069bbd76b515.jpg) Press photo of (from left) Nancy Kwan, Henry Koster, and Jack Soo (back) for the 1961 film Flower Drum Song — Universal Pictures Company, Inc., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Flower_Drum_Song_%281961%29_Press_Photo_of_Nancy_Kwan%2C_Henry_Koster%2C_and_Jack_Soo.jpg/1280px-Flower_Drum_Song_%281961%29_Press_Photo_of_Nancy_Kwan%2C_Henry_Koster%2C_and_Jack_Soo.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Henry Koster](https://film.one/media/person/1229552/gallery-032fa33eed0a.jpg) Henry Koster — Image via TMDB

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 1 nominated

- 1948: Best Director (nominated), for *The Bishop's Wife*

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/henry-koster