---
name: "William A. Wellman"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/william-a-wellman"
roles: ["Director","Writer"]
born: "29 February 1896"
died: "9 December 1975"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 3
average_fi1m_score: 78
average_as: "director"
average_over: 2
updated: "2026-09-19T23:35:14.646136+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."
---

# William A. Wellman

Director and writer. Born 29 February 1896 in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA. Died 9 December 1975.

## Details

- **Work:** Director, Writer
- **Born:** 29 February 1896, Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
- **Died:** 9 December 1975
- **Active:** 1927–2018
- **Also known as:** William Augustus Wellman, William Wellman
- **Titles on Fi1m:** 3: 2 directing, 1 writing
- **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar (1 won · 3 nominated)
- **Average Fi1m score:** 78, as director, over 2 titles
- **Fi1m score by decade:** 1920s 78 (1), 1930s 78 (1), 2010s 82 (1)
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Wellman, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q290962, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0920074/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/14643

## Streaming the US now

- **Pluto TV:** [*A Star Is Born*](https://film.one/film/a-star-is-born-1937.md) (78)
- **Tubi:** [*Wings*](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md) (78)

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

## Fi1m on William A. Wellman

> Wellman flew in the First World War and spent the next thirty-five years putting the camera where the danger was. His best films are fast, plain and physical. The rest were made quickly, and it shows.

The faces in the cockpits of *Wings* (1927) belong to the actors, and the wind is flattening their cheeks. That is the shot to start with. William A. Wellman had flown for the French in the First World War before he came anywhere near a film set, and when Paramount gave him two American boys and a war in the air, he put the cameras up with the aircraft and did not fake a frame of it. Nearly a century later the dogfights still hold. The love story on the ground does not, and the film is 144 minutes long.

He had started as an actor in 1919 and got his first credits directing westerns at Fox in 1923, and after *Wings* he went on to Warner Bros and then freelanced, making more than eighty films across the silent and sound eras. The list is not tidy. *The Public Enemy* (1931) is the gangster film that launched James Cagney. *A Star Is Born* (1937) is a melodrama. *Beau Geste* (1939) is an adventure with Gary Cooper. *The Ox-Bow Incident* (1943) is a western about a lynching and *The Story of G.I. Joe* (1945) is a war film with a considerable reputation. His last film, *Lafayette Escadrille* (1958), went back to the aviators, which tells you where his heart had stayed.

What runs through all of it is a taste for people under pressure and a refusal to dress it up. He worked fast, often satisfied with one or two takes, and it gives the action a documentary flatness that has aged better than most of what his contemporaries were doing. It also made him impatient. In *Wings* the ground scenes only wake up when he gets restless, and the camera glides forward through a Paris nightclub over the tables and bottles as if it had been drinking too. The moment we still feel is smaller: Cooper walks into a tent as Cadet White, bites a chocolate bar, shrugs off a question about luck and walks out to his aeroplane. He is on screen for perhaps two minutes and the camp goes cold around him. We knew what was coming, and Wellman was right not to show it.

That instinct for a man rather than a performance is the whole of his method, and he said as much in 1952: "Movie stardom isn't about acting ability, it's personality and temperament." It got him Cooper twice and John Wayne three times, and it got him a run of 1930s and 1940s pictures that were competent and no more. The criticism that he was workmanlike is fair for a good part of the list. He did not linger, and some films needed him to.

Start with *Wings*, for the air, and skip nothing. Then follow him down to the ground, where he was more interested in what a frightened man does than in what an actor can do, and see how often that turned out to be enough.

## Biography

William Augustus Wellman (29 February 1896 – 9 December 1975) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and actor. A former World War I fighter pilot with the Lafayette Escadrille, he began his film career as an actor before directing his first credited features in 1923. He went on to direct more than 80 films from the silent era through the 1950s.

Wellman is best known for *Wings* (1927), the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and for directing *The Public Enemy* (1931), *A Star Is Born* (1937), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Story, *Nothing Sacred* (1937), *Beau Geste* (1939) and *The Ox-Bow Incident* (1943). He received three further Academy Award nominations for Best Director.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, britannica.com, imdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (3)

### Directed (2) — the average rests on these

- *A Star Is Born* (1937), Fi1m 78, Director, Story — [page](https://film.one/film/a-star-is-born-1937.md)
- *Wings* (1927), Fi1m 78, as Doughboy (uncredited) — [page](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md)

### Wrote (1)

- *A Star Is Born* (2018), Fi1m 82, Original Story — [page](https://film.one/film/a-star-is-born.md)

## Complete filmography (89)

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

- *A Star Is Born* (2018), Original Story — Fi1m 82, [page](https://film.one/film/a-star-is-born.md)
- *A Star Is Born* (1976), Story
- *The Men Who Made the Movies* (1973), series, Actor
- *Lafayette Escadrille* (1958), Story, Producer, Director
- *Darby's Rangers* (1958), Director
- *Good-bye, My Lady* (1956), Director
- *Blood Alley* (1955), Director
- *Track of the Cat* (1954), Director
- *A Star Is Born* (1954), Story
- *The High and the Mighty* (1954), Director
- *Island in the Sky* (1953), as Narrator (voice) (uncredited) · Director
- *My Man and I* (1952), Director
- *Westward the Women* (1951), Director
- *It's a Big Country* (1951), Director
- *Across the Wide Missouri* (1951), Director
- *The Happy Years* (1950), Director
- *The Next Voice You Hear...* (1950), Director
- *Battleground* (1949), Director
- *Yellow Sky* (1948), Director
- *The Iron Curtain* (1948), Director
- *Magic Town* (1947), Director, Producer
- *Gallant Journey* (1946), Director, Producer, Writer
- *Story of G.I. Joe* (1945), Director
- *This Man's Navy* (1945), Director
- *Buffalo Bill* (1944), Director
- *Lady of Burlesque* (1943), Director
- *The Ox-Bow Incident* (1943), Director
- *Thunder Birds* (1942), Director
- *Roxie Hart* (1942), Director
- *The Great Man's Lady* (1941), Director, Producer
- *Reaching for the Sun* (1941), Director
- *The Light That Failed* (1939), Director, Producer
- *Beau Geste* (1939), Producer, Director
- *Men with Wings* (1938), Director, Producer
- *Nothing Sacred* (1937), Director
- *The Last Gangster* (1937), Story
- *A Star Is Born* (1937), Story, Director — Fi1m 78, [page](https://film.one/film/a-star-is-born-1937.md)
- *Tarzan Escapes* (1936), Co-Director
- *Small Town Girl* (1936), Director
- *Robin Hood of El Dorado* (1936), Director, Screenplay
- *Call of the Wild* (1935), Director
- *China Seas* (1935), Second Unit Director
- *The President Vanishes* (1934), Director
- *Stingaree* (1934), Director
- *Looking for Trouble* (1934), Director
- *Female* (1933), Assistant Director
- *College Coach* (1933), Director
- *Wild Boys of the Road* (1933), Director
- *Midnight Mary* (1933), Director
- *Heroes for Sale* (1933), Director
- *Lilly Turner* (1933), Director
- *Central Airport* (1933), Director
- *Frisco Jenny* (1933), as Reporter (uncredited) · Director
- *The Conquerors* (1932), Director
- *The Purchase Price* (1932), Director
- *Love is a Racket* (1932), Director
- *So Big!* (1932), Director
- *The Hatchet Man* (1932), Director
- *Safe in Hell* (1931), Director
- *The Star Witness* (1931), as Company Workman (uncredited) · Director
- *Night Nurse* (1931), Director
- *The Public Enemy* (1931), Director
- *Other Men's Women* (1931), Director
- *Maybe It's Love* (1930), Director
- *Young Eagles* (1930), Director
- *Dangerous Paradise* (1930), Director
- *Woman Trap* (1929), Director
- *The Man I Love* (1929), Director
- *Chinatown Nights* (1929), Director
- *Beggars of Life* (1928), Director
- *Ladies of the Mob* (1928), Director, Producer
- *The Legion of the Condemned* (1928), Director, Producer
- *Wings* (1927), as Doughboy (uncredited) · Director — Fi1m 78, [page](https://film.one/film/wings-1927.md)
- *You Never Know Women* (1926), Director
- *The Cat's Pajamas* (1926), Director
- *The Boob* (1926), Director
- *When Husbands Flirt* (1925), Director
- *The Circus Cowboy* (1924), Director
- *The Vagabond Trail* (1924), Director
- *Not a Drum Was Heard* (1924), Director
- *Cupid's Fireman* (1923), Director
- *Big Dan* (1923), Director
- *The Man Who Won* (1923), Director
- *Second Hand Love* (1923), Director
- *Edgar's Hamlet* (1920), Assistant Director
- *Edgar and the Teacher's Pet* (1920), Assistant Director
- *Evangeline* (1919), as British lieutenant
- *The Knickerbocker Buckaroo* (1919), as Henry
- *The Unwritten Code* (1918), Assistant Director

## Gallery

- ![William A. Wellman drama director. An autographed picture 1937 and also aviator, screenwriter, actor and producer](https://film.one/media/person/361704/gallery-2ab53be5eed7.jpg) William A. Wellman drama director. An autographed picture 1937 and also aviator, screenwriter, actor and producer — This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1931 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart as well as a detailed definition of "publication" for public art. Note that it may still be copyrighted in jurisdictions that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works (depending on the date of the author's death), such as Canada (50 p.m.a.), Mainland China (50 p.m.a., not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 p.m.a.), Mexico (100 p.m.a.), Switzerland (70 p.m.a.), and other countries with individual treaties., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/William_A._Wellman%2C_1937.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![William A. Wellman](https://film.one/media/person/361704/gallery-9a27f7edea2f.png) William A. Wellman — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/First_Lieutenant_William_Augustus_Wellman.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![William Wellman in a captured German Rumpler (1918)](https://film.one/media/person/361704/gallery-5138f0b25309.jpg) William Wellman in a captured German Rumpler (1918) — William Augustus Wellman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/William_Wellman_in_a_German_Rumpler.jpg/1280px-William_Wellman_in_a_German_Rumpler.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 1 won, 3 nominated

- 1955: Best Director (nominated), for *The High and the Mighty*
- 1950: Best Director (nominated), for *Battleground*
- 1938: Best Story (won), for *A Star Is Born*
- 1938: Best Director (nominated), for *A Star Is Born*

### Other awards — 1 won

- star on Hollywood Walk of Fame 1960: star on Hollywood Walk of Fame (won)

*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/william-a-wellman