Joseph Kaufman

A detailed biography of the American actor and director Joseph Kaufman (1882-1918) . Kaufman's career started in the first decade of the Twentieth Century in Vaudeville, Broadway and traveling Stock Companies till 1914, when he joined the Lubin Motion Picture company in Pittsburgh, first as an actor and subsequently as a director. In 1916 Kaufman left Lubin and was contracted by Famous Players / Paramount and other major companies to direct features with leading stars such as Billie Burke, Clara Kimball Young or Pauline Frederick. Early 1918 Joseph Kaufman became a victim of the pandemic "Spanish Flu", he died in the age of thirty-six. Married to actress Ethel Clayton, Kaufman's filmography includes some sixty titles within a time-frame of only four years, among those more than a dozen feature length films under his direction. Today, with the exception of one feature and one short film, all motion pictures with Joseph Kaufman are considered lost, and Kaufman is forgotten or ignored even by most of the film-historians. This annotated filmography is the first publication about this director and actor to embrace his whole career from his early acting experiences to his last unfinished film.