Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Joseph Walton Losey III
Born La Crosse, Jan. 14, 1909; raised at 1612 Ferry Street; left Central High in 1925 after his father’s death; died London, June 22, 1984
$28,000
Joseph Walton Losey III was the La Crosse-born filmmaker whose Hollywood career ended in the blacklist and whose European exile produced some of the sharpest British art-house cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in La Crosse on January 14, 1909, and raised in money at 1612 Ferry Street—a house Edward J. Roth had built in 1887 for $3,500—he grew up with an aunt, Mary, who had married into the Easton family and taught him what culture was supposed to look like. He made the Central High honor roll with his sister Mary. In February 1925 his father died; he left school that year, went to Dartmouth, began medicine at Harvard, and finished in the theater. The boulevard and the 1901 Memorial Arch still carry his grandfather’s name. Hollywood hired him, then hunted him. After The Boy with Green Hair and years in New York political theater, the House Un-American Activities Committee came for his Communist Party card. He spent two weeks dodging a subpoena in 1951 and was settled in London for good by 1953. That exile became the career: The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between with Harold Pinter—the last of them winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1971—plus Monsieur Klein, which took the César. Tennessee Williams once called Boom! (1968), a flop with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the best screen version of one of his plays; Losey sometimes named it his own favorite. He never really came home. He died in London on June 22, 1984. La Crosse still knows the surname because of the boulevard; the films are what he did after he stopped being the rich kid on Ferry Street.