Another Hungarian who went abroad to become world-famous: Sir Alexander Korda

He was born in a small Hungarian village, went abroad because of the Horthy regime and quickly became one of the most well-known director-producers in the world. Sándor Korda (Sir Alexander Korda) made the British filmmaking sector prosper in the 1930s and 1940s.

According to divany.hu, he was born as Sándor László Kellner in 1893 in Pusztatúrpásztó (today Túrkeve), 150 kilometres away from Budapest in a Jewish family.

Interestingly, he had two brothers who worked in the movie sector, as well. They went to a boarding school in Túrkeve: on Monday morning a cart took them to the school and brought them back on Friday. When his father died, they moved to Kecskemét to his grandfather, but he regularly beat them. Therefore, Sándor

decided to move to Budapest at the age of 15.

He continued his schools there and started to work, as well, so he managed to bring his family to Budapest. He wanted to become an author so he read a lot and that is why he later made so many film adaptations of classic literary works. In his free time, he went to coffee houses to talk about politics and that is how he became a journalist writing for Független Magyarország (Independent Hungary) and took the name Korda as a pseudonym because students were forbidden to work as journalists.

Since nobody wanted to write reviews of the movies because they regarded it as inferior journalism, he did that and, by 1912, he became a columnist. Later he founded the first Hungarian newspaper writing about films, titled Pesti Mozi. He was not enlisted during WWI because of he had defects in vision.

He was only 21-year-old when he could make his first movie titled “The deceived journalist” (1914).

In 1915, he made his first full-length feature film, “A tiszti kardbojt“. Jenő Janovich, leader of the Corvin studio in Kolozsvár, hired him and, after he returned to the capital, he founded the Budapest department of the film studio. He established his offices in the Róna street where today the headquarters of the Hungarian commercial TV-channel, TV2 can be found.

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He wanted to make movies by adapting Hungarian classics that imitate the dramaturgy and technical developments of the American films. One of his best films from those days was created in 1918 adapting Mór Jókai’s “Az aranyember“, a famous novel still compulsory in every Hungarian school.