Screenwriter, director, producer, musician, journalist.
Best remembered for his film collaborations with director/producer Michael Powell, Oscar-winning screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian British writer who initially studied mathematics and engineering at the Universities of Prague and Stuttgart. Following his father's death he was forced to abandon his studies and initially pursued a career in journalism - working in both Hungary and Germany. In the late 1920s he turning to screenwriting but after the after the Nazis came to power in Germany he moved to Paris and later London (ca. 1935) in order to continue working. He and Powell first worked together in 1939 on the film The Spy in Black, and maintained an on-going working relationship until just after World War II.
Pressburger's association with the film They're a Weird Mob, was a direct result of his continuing friendship with Powell. The film rights had been optioned in 1959 by American actor Gregory Peck but he could not come up with a workable screenplay. After Powell read the novel in 1960 and wanted to turn it into a film but had to wait some three years before Peck relinquished them. Powell then engaged Pressburger to write the screenplay (which he did under the pseudonym Richard Imrie).
