Nicholas Ray

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Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr., July 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director best known for the film Rebel Without a Cause. Ray is also known for several narrative features created between 1947 and 1963, including Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night, and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work that was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer.

Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded.

Ray had a major influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard remarking in a Bitter Victory review, "cinema is Nicholas Ray."

Personal life

Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr., was the youngest child in his family and the only one, who was named "Ray" or "Junior." Alice, 1906-1903; Ruth, 1903; and Helen, 1905. He had two half-sisters from his father's first marriage. Both married, but they continued to live near their father. When his son was born, Raymond, Sr., was a building contractor at forty-eight. He retired and relocated his family from Galesville, Mississippi, where they will be nearer their mother after World War I. Raymond, Sr., loved reading and music, as well as son Ray, who remembered Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin playing on the Mississippi River banks in 1920. Mother Lena was a Lutheran and teetotaler, but her father drank and frequented speakeasies, and it was in one, when his father vanished in 1927, that Ray tracked down his father's mistress, who led him to a hotel room where Raymond, Sr., was insensate. He died the next day. Ray was sixteen years old at the time.

Ray had been indulged by his mother and sisters as the youngest child, and now he was the only male in the household. However, one by one, his sisters stayed home. Alice had completed education, married, and moved to Madison, and by the time her father died, she had become Oshkosh. Ruth's middle sister was taken to his first film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and she was the first in the family to have theatrical aspirations, as he later referred to her—but the family was foiled by her relatives. She moved to Chicago and married a scientist, but she indulged in her love of the arts as an avid audience member. Helen had a success in her veins, spent time on a children's radio station before becoming a tutor.

Ray was sent to Chicago to live with his sister Ruth and enroll in Robert A. Waller High, returning to La Crosse Central Midway through his senior year, becoming increasingly unmanageable after his father's death. He was well-known, with a keen sense of humour about himself, according to school newspapers and yearbooks. He played football and basketball and was a cheerleader, but there were perhaps more social activities than athletic ones. Debate was a greater passion, and he took elocution lessons and later joined "Falstaff Club," the school's drama club, but not as an onstage presence. Patrick McGilligan, a biographer, said he was "fundamentally ill and lonely" as an adolescent, and he was "prone to long, ambiguous silences." This was typical of Ray's talks for the remainder of his life. Ray was given a scholarship to be an announcer at the local radio station WKBH for a year while enrolled in La Crosse Teachers College, but he didn't have a gift for a mellifluous, deep voice. (Later, he'd describe this award as "a scholarship to every university in the world" — a narrative embellishment typical of him. He said he joined a troupe of stunt fliers the summer after, but also with an airborne bootlegger.)

He joined the Buskin Club, where he discovered a girlfriend, Kathryn Snodgrass, the school president's niece, as in high school. They've also worked as editors on the Racquet, the school newspaper, she on features, and he on sports, and as co-writers of a stage revue based on a college student who goes to Hollywood. "Ray and Kay" was the couple's nickname on campus. Ray appeared on the revue as compere for the February Follies. He rose to lead the school's main production, The New Poor, a 1924 comedy by Cosmo Hamilton, in April 1930. Ray, the Buskins, grew to fame, and he began dressing as an early twentieth-century aesthete. He also started to write more left-leaning political commentary in the college newspaper. He nourished other vices that would persist for the bulk of his life. He courted several young women and balanced insomnia with alcohol-infused socializing all night long after Kay Snodgrass broke up and moved to Madison, Wisconsin.

A hometown friend studying at the University of Chicago had sluggishly praised his classes with Thornton Wilder, who had already impressed Ray when he had first seen the writer in La Crosse. Ray had improved results and was ready to move in 1931. He was pledged to a fraternity and played some football, but he was more committed to college life, which involved alcohol consumption and recruiting college girls, according to his own account. He also recalled a gay experience after being approached by the university's Director of Drama, Frank Hurburt O'Hara, "becoming more tolerant and directing some of the actors with whom I worked." Ray attended just one quarter at the University of Chicago and returned to La Crosse in December, resuming enrollment in Teachers College in fall 1932, where he declared himself "apparently free of amorous entanglements." Clarence Hiskey, his brother, and himself became activists in the beginning of the US Communist Party this year.

Ray left college and, now named Nicholas Ray, was looking for new challenges, including meeting Frank Lloyd Wright in the hopes of attending Wright's Fellowship at Taliesin as 1932 came to an end. Ray was visiting New York City in 1933, where he had his first experiences with the city's bohemia despite paying for the tuition. Ray met young writer Jean Evans (born Jean Abrahams, later Abrams), and they began a friendship shortly before his stint at Taliesin. They lived together and married in 1936 after he returned east, and he married in 1936. By January 1937, Ray and his family had migrated to Arlington, Virginia, where they had been working at the Washington, D.C. Anthony Nicholas (born November 24, 1937), also known as Tony, was named for Ray's acquaintance and fellow Federal Theatre director Anthony Mann. Both Ray and Evans' lives, as well as Ray and Robert's drinking and unfaithfulness threatened their marriage. Evans returned to New York in 1940, having landed a job at PM, the new leftist newspaper. In May of that year, Ray returned to New York, as well as in May of that year, but soon the couple separated. He returned to reconcile a few months later, while simultaneously staying at Almanac House, a Greenwich Village loft occupied by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, the Almanac Singers' main members. He committed himself to psychoanalysis for a few weeks, but then he fell back to old habits. In December 1941, Evans applied for divorce, and the case was finally concluded the next year.

Ray had been refused military service due to medical problems, but he was employed at the Office of War Information (OWI), which was under John Houseman. Connie Ernst, the daughter of lawyer Morris L. Ernst, and a producer of The Voice of America, were amongst those presenters. She and Ray lived together in New York from 1942 to 1944, when the OWI sent her to London before D-day, and after she saw another employee, Michael Bessie, who later married, she remembered him. Ray later wrote, "We had once intended to marry," she later remembered, though she had already regretted his alcohol and gambling. "Being with Nick was very difficult."

Ray first lived in a flat in In A Lonely Place on the corner of Harper and Fountain, which became the model for the apartment building in In A Lonely Place, before moving to a house in Santa Monica. At Fox, he socialized with fellow transplanted east coasters and theatre folk alike, including Judith Tuvim, who will be known as Judy Holliday after his marriage ended in New York. On one occasion, fueled by alcohol, they waded into Santa Monica Bay, an excursion that turned into a halfhearted double suicide attempt before they changed their minds and returned to dry land.

"I was infatuated with her but not that much." When directing A Woman's Secret, he became involved with her co-star Gloria Grahame later remembered. Nevertheless, they married in Las Vegas on June 1, 1948, only five hours after her first husband's divorce was granted and five months before their son, Timothy, was born on November 12. (RKO revealed that he was born "almost four months before the date he was scheduled.) Tensions in their marriage were early on, and when shooting In A Lonely Place in autumn 1949, they had broken for the first time, keeping the break private from studio executives. At the end of the year, they announced that they intended to spend the holidays with Ray's family there, but they went to New York and Boston alone to plan their new project, On Dangerous Ground, with his ex-wife and firstborn. Ray and Grahame were said to have reconciled, living in Malibu, as the project was complete, in 1950, when it was finished, and as In A Lonely Place was open, but their marriage remained unhappy. Ray said he and his son, Tony, who was 13 years old at the time, discovered Grahame in bed with his son, who was 13. Ray and Grahame were briefly linked again when they were called on to assist Macao (1952), a program that Josef von Sternberg was directing for RKO, despite the fact that they were irreparably distumed. Ray produced additional scenes, but none in which she was included. Grahame applied for divorce, but she testified in court that Ray had assaulted her twice, once at a party and once at home, before the divorce was granted on August 15, 1952. Gloria Grahame and Tony Ray married in 1960 and divorced in 1974. Tony Ray died on June 29, 2018, age 80.

The HUAC's Hollywood and entertainment industry, which largely coincided with Ray's marriage and divorce from Gloria Grahame, have weighed in on him. In the aftermath of the 1947 hearings, RKO colleagues, including Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, were among the celebrities who had been condemned for disrespect of Congress; Knock On Any Door and In A Lonely Place actor Elia Kazan, who later refused to identify names, testified anonymously in 1952, and later doing so in order to safeguard his career. Ray's personal communications with the committee are uncertain (McGilligan reports a gap in Ray's Freedom of Information files, 1948-1963), but his ex-wife Jean Evans remembered that he testified she was "the one who brought him to the Communist Youth League, which wasn't correct at all."

Although he had been skeptical of therapy as a result of a court order in his divorce, Carel Van der Heide began to see psychoanalyst Carel Van der Heide. Nonetheless, he continued womanizing (columnist Dorothy Kilgallen called him "a well-known film colony heartbreaker") and partying (bringing continues). Shelley Winters and Marilyn Monroe, who were roommates at the time, as well as Joan Crawford, who was planning a suspense film, Lisbon, 1952, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, were among his favorite characters. Hanne Axmann (also known as Hanna Axmann) and later Hanna Axmann-Rezzori), who wanted to begin an acting career, became more close to him. She left her struggling marriage to actor Edward Tierney to live with Ray at a time for him that included alcohol, gin rummy, and an analysis that did him no favor. When Ray was making Johnny Guitar (which featured her brother-in-law Scott Brady), he begged her to return to Germany and said he'd join her. He did not keep up on the promise, but they kept in touch and friends for years after.

Johnny Guitar was ranked highly on Variety's list of "1954 Boxoffice Champions," boosting his professional income. By now, he had moved to Bungalow 2 at Chateau Marmont's headquarters, and was shooting Rebel Without A Cause, a cause of particular concern to him, about troubled young people. Lew Wasserman had been told by his agent that he should make such a film, so he brought him to Warner Bros. The hotel residence also became Ray's headquarters and rehearsal space, and it was where James Dean landed in the hopes of meeting the director. Dean began attending Ray's "Sunday afternoons," his regular gatherings of friends at the bungalow, where scenes from the film were beginning to take form. Natalie Wood recalled Ray's friendship with him as "fatherly" and attributed the same quality to Sal Mineo's and her own relationship with him, even though the sixteen-year-old was sexually attracted to him, and his bungalow became the site of their assignments, while supporting player Dennis Hopper was also involved. Ray himself was occupied with roomsmates Monroe and Winters, Geneviève Aumont (then the profession of Michèle Montau), and even Lew Wasserman's wife, Edie, while still curious in Jayne Mansfield, who was auditioned for the role Wood played in Rebel.

Ray and Wood continued their affair for several months after production was concluded, and when he was shooting his next project, Hot Blood (1956), a pregnancy frightener that turned out to be false, she decided to avoid the romance. Dean had reservations about Ray, but their confidence, collaboration, and friendship grew, and they discussed forming a production company, collaborating again, and, after Rebel Without A Cause opened, sharing a Nicaragua holiday. With Dean's death in a car accident on September 30, 1955, Ray was devastated and beft. He needed to be in Germany on a European tour at the time, but also in alcohol. Ray had been more moderate for some time, particularly during the summer when he was filming on Rebel, but "I think it was all over on that September night of 1955," one friend said.

Ray was bisexual, according to some biographers, and the University of Chicago aided him in his sexual experimentation. Ray denied this in 1977, but said, "everyone has occasional fantasies or daydreams about same-sex relations." Ray is returning to Europe, in London, with whom he had corresponded since Lambert's pioneering positive review of They Live By Night. Lambert recalls Ray's comments about Dix Steele, Bogart's character, at the end of the film: "Will he become a hopeless drunk, kill himself, or seek psychiatric assistance?" By the way, those have always been my personal choices." After a night of vodka and chat, Ray and Lambert, who was gay, had sex, and Ray cautioned that he was "not really homosexual, not even bisexual," while Ray and Lambert, who was bisexual," and that he had slept with several women, but only two or three men. Ray advised Lambert to accompany him to Hollywood for work on what became Bigger Than Life, and Lambert stayed a sometimes-sexual partner, although Ray continued to pursue women. Ray "behaved like a possessive husband, with the hope of me being always on call," according to Lambert, while Ray continued to mourn the loss of James Dean.

Bigger Than Life follows the tale of a man who becomes increasingly dependent on his medication use and, eventually, more broken. Even on Ray, Ray's links to Ray, who had become increasingly dependent on both alcohol and opioids, were not lost. Ray confessed to himself in a private journal entry that year "continuously blackout" existed between 1957 and present day, and his wife Susan, who saw the movie, told her husband, "This is your story before you lived it." Ray's opioid use was minimized while shooting Bitter Victory by his new girlfriend, a heroin addict named Manon, and his gambling losses led him to a sad place that ended his relationship with Gavin Lambert.

Betty Utey, seventeen years old, first crossed paths with Nick Ray at RKO in 1951, when he was hired to direct some more scenes for Androcles and the Lion (1952), including one with a troupe of bikini-clad dancers. He referred to it as the "steam room of the vestal virgins." He took her out to the ballet and dinner and then led her to the house he was renting after having a split with Gloria Grahame some weeks after shooting the scene, in which he featured her. They called a taxi and carried her home at the end of their evening, like In A Lonely Place. When he called her to his Chateau Marmont bungalow for an assignment, she did not hear from him for nearly three years. He vanished again, until 1956, when he called again. She was crowned one of the chorines in 1958, and as a result of the shooting, they eloped to Maine, where Ray hoped to start his third marriage by drying out. He collapsed at Logan Airport in Boston, still suffering from the DTs. He recovered well enough to travel to Kennebunkport, where the couple spent several weeks before marrying on October 13, 1958. They had two daughters, one born in Rome, on January 10, 1960, and the other in Nicca, 1961. Lena, Ray's mother, died in March 1959.

The family moved from Rome to Madrid in early 1963, where Ray used funds earned by his Samuel Bronston job to fund new ventures, but it never came to fruition. Nicca's opened with a partner, after his younger daughter's, and it became Madrid's most popular restaurant, but also a place for Ray to sink a fortune in its first year. Sumner Williams, his nephew (whom he had appeared in many pictures throughout the 1950s), was hired to handle it. Ray's unhealthy habits remained: excessive drinks and pills, but not enough sleep. In 1964, he and his wife divorced, and they returned to the United States with their children, but he remained in Europe. They were married until January 1, 1970, when they divorced and Betty Ray remarried.

Ray lived etically in Paris, London, Zagreb, Munich, and, for a time, Sylt, a German island off the coast of North Sea, was a resident of the island. Tim, his younger son, who later graduated from Cambridge, would assist with an autobiography, and the younger one would transcribe, though no such memoir appeared in Nick Ray's lifetime. Wherever he went, Ray's family and friends were used to him delivering a handout. "He began drinking, transitioning to a black coffee diet, going through slumbery, then crashing for forty-eight hours at a time," Bernard Eisenschitz writes. Ray and his son were trapped in the political uprising in Paris, with double bills of Johnny Guitar and They Live By Night.

On November 14, 1969, he returned to the United States, landing in Washington, D.C., just in time for the second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. As the trial of the Chicago Eight, which would later become the Chicago Seven, began shortly, he announced plans for a documentary about "the young rebels of the 1960s" and relocated to Chicago. On the evening of December 3, the defendants and their families were filmed, on the evening of the trial. Fred Hampton, the Illinois chair of the Black Panther Party, was shot in his sleep over night, and Ray and his crew were on the scene early in the morning to film the aftermath.

The venture had evolved from a documentary to a strange dramatic reconstruction, for which Ray considered casting Dustin Hoffman, Groucho Marx, or even long-serving James Cagney as the trial judge Julius Hoffman. Ray was asleep at the editing table in late January 1970, not unusually, and he woke up to a "heavy" sensation in his right eye. "It took me six hours to find a doctor, and if I'd made it twenty minutes earlier, they would have been able to inject nic acid and save the eye." According to writer Myron Meisel, Ray was hospitalized from January 28 to February 6, and that was Ray's first cancer treatment. Despite this explanation, Ray remained vague about the cause, and McGilligan mentions several potential sources and witnesses to Ray's diminished vision, including a special-effects blast fifteen years ago, when shooting Run For Cover (1955). Ray began wearing a key component in his mystique's creation in 1970, however. He was tall, craggy, with a leonine mane of white hair, and now a black spot over his right eye, examining, in the remembrances of his student Charles Bornstein's "like a cross between Noah, a king, and God."

During the trial, Chicago Seven lawyer William Kunstler introduced Ray to Susan Schwartz, an eighteen-year-old new to the University of Chicago who dropped classes to watch the courtroom theatrics. She found herself in a taxi on the way to join the hive of life around Ray's house in February 1970. "The decision was straightforward: at the end of the term, I would stop school and start the journey, whatever it was." They became companions, and the journey continued long after Ray's life and beyond.

They moved to New York City, where Schwartz worked in real estate and then publishing, to make a living for both of them, although Ray wanted to continue filming and start other projects. They stayed with Ray's old cronies, including Alan Lomax and Connie Bessie, before finding a place of their own, while Ray continued to indulge in their addictions and remained haunted by Times Square's late night. Dennis Hopper invited Ray to his house in Taos, New Mexico, where Hopper was filming The Last Movie (1971). At least until the expenses of hosting Nicholas Ray were paid, Ray discovered chaos of creativity and debauchery, of a form he had grown up on, but Hopper immediately exaggerated it to $2,500 per month, prompting Hopper to tell him to leave. Ray begged Susan to marry him in Taos, Spain, in return, she gave him his ring in exchange, and in return, she gave him a pearl.

While in New Mexico in spring 1971, Ray was invited to speak at Harpur College, the state University of New York's academic unit. Ray should teach in the Cinema Department, becoming one of the epicenters of experimental film in the United States, after he told Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs. Ray was first appointed to a two-year job in the fall of 1972. He began living in a student's infirmary. He then rented a farmhouse and the hours that students spent there, turning it into a communal life and working situation, as depicted by his Chateau Marmont bungalow, but the 1930s New York scene of political theatre and music, as well as heroin and cocaine adds to alcohol and creativity as fuel.

"There was rising tension that became animosity," one of the students, mainly between Jacobs and Ray. Both artists' differences may have arisened in part due to their respective aesthetics. Jacobs and Gottheim worked within the relatively non-narrative and in some degrees formalist film field, although Ray's experience was in drama and mainstream narrative cinema. Nonetheless, the project on which he and his students were based, Gun Under My Pillow, first introduced as a teen, in Rebel Without A Cause) and then titled We Can't Go Home Again, may have been seen as consistent with the department's avant-garde approaches to filmmaking. Nonetheless, he and Jacobs were both, in the recollection of one student's "highly positive people with tempers," and they came into conflict, in Gottheim's opinion, involving "a need for control and love," particularly among their students. Despite other points of contention, Ray's project and student crew's monopolization and misappropriation of the department's filmmaking facilities, as well as Ray's cocaine and alcohol use and his students' imitation of him were among the complaints. Gottheim had mediated the tensions among his subordinates, but the confrontation escalated in spring 1973 when Jacobs took over as acting chair, although Ray's employment was not renewed shortly thereafter. Jacobs would later describe Ray's selection as a "calamitous mistake."

Ray's aim was to work on We Can't Go Home Again in order to screen it at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973. He left Binghamton, followed by a few students who pushed the film's parts around the country in a driveaway vehicle, and friends who would welcome him as a visitor. He started in Los Angeles, where he came back to Bungalow 2 at Chateau Marmont, raising bills and requesting funds from his old Hollywood connections. Susan was able to get them both (and the film) to France, but not Susan. Ray's fame in Europe may have helped secure a film slot at Cannes, but the press and other festivalgoers were left wondering that the film was worthy of notice.

At loose ends, Ray and Susan spent some time in Paris, borrowing money from his longtime champion François Truffaut and raising hotel bills paid by writer Françoise Sagan. Susan and Ray spent time on a boat owned by Sterling Hayden's "Johnny Guitar," a popular tourist attraction in New York nearly 20 years ago. Ray travelled to Amsterdam to film The Janitor, a Max Fischer softcore anthology film. By the year's end, he was back west, to the San Francisco Bay Area in March 1974. The intention was a retrospective of his films at the Pacific Film Archive, but he left with boxes of film and personal effects, presumably for a long time. He worked overnight in the editing rooms of Francis Coppola's Zoetrope facility, and after being turned away from that welcome at the film collective Cine Manifestation, he lived in a spare room at archive curator Tom Luddy's home and worked overnight shifts in the editing rooms, and at the film collective Cine Manifestation. Ray was admitted to hospital twice, one for alcohol haemorrhaging while in the area, twice for alcoholic haemorrhaging. Luddy called Tony Ray to inform him of Ray's death, but Ray's son refused to do anything, and Ray's son said nothing, and Luddy called John Houseman, who happened to be in the area, for the second time.

Ray returned to Southern California in 1974 to stay with his ex-wife Betty and their children, Julie, now fourteen, and Nicca, almost thirteen years old, who had not seen since they had left Spain ten years ago. Betty recalled, "It was like finding a man who had been emptied out." She arranged for a home where she could stop drinking but found that he needed medical assistance and had him admitted to the detoxification unit at Los Angeles County Hospital but soon learned that he didn't want to drink more. Ray recovered, although he tried to persuade his older daughter to buy cocaine for him. He left a note saying, "it is best I live apart from you and our children" for several reasons, and that, "above all others, I can bring you no joy."

He attended Sal Mineo's funeral in February 1976 and then moved to New York City, where he was invited to direct a film starring Marilyn Chambers and Rip Torn, but the initiative never materialized until July 1976. He continued to drink and abuse opioids and found himself in and out of hospital, with a variety of illnesses and injuries as a result of injury. Susan eventually divorced him, and she gave him the ultimatum that she would not return unless he checked in to the Smithers Alcoholism and Rehabilitation Center, and he was sober for one month. He had himself confessed less than a week earlier. He stayed for ninety days before being discharged early in November 1976. He and Susan moved to a Soho loft at 167 Spring Street, and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Ray began to see some new opportunities in early 1977. Wim Wenders portrayed him in a small but important role in The American Friend (1977), alongside Dennis Hopper. He began to teach acting and directing at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and then at New York University at the same time, with the help of old friends Elia Kazan and John Houseman. He was also interested in directing a few films, including The Story of Bill W., about the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nevertheless, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1977. The tumor was too close to his aorta to be safely removed by surgery, so he underwent cobalt therapy.

In summer 1977, he went to California, taking Betty and Nicca to dinner and leaving his daughter a note that made her "start understanding me better than Betty ever did." In February 1978, he returned west to take part in Milo Forman's Hair (1979). Where he had appeared strong in The American Friend, he now looked gaunt and drawn. After his scenes were shot, he visited Houseman in Malibu and summoned Nicca so he would alert his daughter that he was dying of cancer. They stayed in touch, and although she wished to fly to New York, it was the last time they saw each other.

Ray underwent further surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on April 11, 1978, involving radioactive particle delivery. On May 26, then underwent surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. He was frail and coughed in pain, but he had lost his hair, but he was also employed to teach another summer workshop at NYU. He was then invited by László Benedek, once Ray's son, to teach in the fall as a Hollywood actor and now chair of the NYU graduate film program. Ray Jarmusch, a teaching assistant who will soon be a mentor, was given a teaching assistant by Ray.

Ray had discussed with his son Tim about making a documentary about a father-son relationship ahead of his death. Despite the fact that the project was unpursued, Tim Ray, who worked in film, was involved in the production of Lightning Over Water, a Ray and Wenders joint venture, but the participants were all acknowledged collectively. Ray was wasting away and had to be admitted to the hospital for intravenous feeding, losing some weight, and purchasing some time. Thousands of people visited Ray, including Kazan, Connie Bessie, Alan Lomax and his first wife, Jean, as well as Harpur College students and his more recent students.

On June 16, 1979, Ray died in a heart disease hospital. Following a memorial service at Lincoln Center, a memorial was unveiled. All four of his wives and all four of his children were present at the conference. Helen and Alice (Ruth had died in a fire in 1965) and his remains were returned to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where his parents were interred in the same section of Oak Grove Cemetery. There is no inscription in his grave.

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Early life and career

Ray was born in Galesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children and only son of Olene "Lena" and Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, a builder and designer. His paternal grandparents, who were German, and his maternal grandparents, Norwegians. He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which was also the home town of future colleague director Joseph Losey. Ray was sent to live in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Waller High School and embedded himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife, as a popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse, as an example. On his return to La Crosse in his senior year, he became a fine orator, winning a competition at local radio station WKBH (now WIZM) while also hanging around a local stock theater.

He graduated in 152nd place in a class of 153) of his class at La Crosse Central High School in 1929, with strong English and public speaking, as well as failures in Latin, physics, and geometry. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) for two years before graduating the requisite grades to apply for admission to the University of Chicago in 1931. Despite the fact that he attended just one semester at the university due to heavy drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to foster a friendship with dramatist Thornton Wilder, who later became a professor.

Ray returned to Chicago and formed the La Crosse Little Theatre Company, which appeared in many productions since 1932, after being involved in the Student Dramatic Association during his time as a member of the Chicago Alumni Association. In the fall of that year, he briefly enrolled at the State Teachers College. He had contributed a regular column of musings, "The Bullshevist," to the Racquet, the college's weekly newspaper, and had begun writing for it when he returned, but Patrick McGilligan, Ray, with friend Clarence Hiskey, had arranged meetings to try to establish a La Crosse chapter of the Communist Party USA before his time in Chicago, but before his time there, he was active. He had left the State Teachers College and began using the moniker "Nicholas Ray" in his correspondence by early 1933.

Ray Wright's home, Taliesin, Wisconsin, was discovered by his acquaintances with Thornton Wilder and others he had to know in Chicago. He developed a friendship with Wright in order to apply for "the Fellowship" as the community of Wright "apprentices" was known. Wright had asked Ray to direct the recently constructed Hillside Playhouse, a room at Taliesin that would be used for musical and dramatic performances, as well as other performances. Ray had his first encounter with non-Hollywood cinema at regular film screenings often encompassing foreign films. In spring 1934, he and his mentor had a falling-out, but Wright told him not to leave the house immediately.

Ray was in New York City, where he had his first interactions with the political theatre in reaction to the Great Depression, while negotiating with Wright. Ray returned from Taliesin after being evicted from the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, a cultural troupe that had recently renamed the Theatre of Action. Nik Ray played in several films, some of whom he later appeared in his films, including Will Lee and Curt Conway and others who became friends for life, including Elia Kazan. He was later employed by the Federal Theatre Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration. He befriended folklorist Alan Lomax and toured with him through rural America, collecting traditional vernacular music. Lomax produced and directed Back Where I Come From, a pioneering folk music radio radio program starring Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Pete Seeger of CBS, from 1940 to 1941. In several of his films, American folk songs would later appear prominently.

Ray managed and managed radio propaganda for the United States Office of War Information and the Voice of America broadcasting service under John Houseman's aegis. The FBI inspected Ray in 1942 and gave him a "tentative riskiness" rating. In addition, Director J. Edgar Hoover personally recommended "Custodial Detention." Though Hoover's plan was later quashed by the Justice Department in autumn 1943, Ray was one of more than twenty OWI workers identified as having Communist affiliations or sympathies, despite the fact that he was "discharged from the WPA's Washington, DC community service for Communist causes." The FBI soon established the case of "Nicholas K. Ray," but "as not warranting an investigation" was not forthcoming." Ray renewed his acquaintance with Molly Day Thatcher, Houseman's assistant, and Elia Kazan, a resident of New York theatre days, at the OWI. In 1944, when heading to Hollywood to direct A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan suggested that Ray go west and recruit him as an assistant.

Ray, who is back in the United States, produced his first and only Broadway performance, Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. He was assistant director, under director Houseman of another Broadway musical, Lute Song, with music by Raymond Scott earlier this year. Ray was also able to work in television, one of his few forays into the new medium, thanks to Houseman. The Houseman had agreed to direct an adaptation of Lucille Fletcher's radio drama, Sorry, Wrong Number, for CBS, and named Ray as his collaborator. Mildred Natwick is the pregnant woman who believes she is the object of a murder plot with the help of a hacker who overhears on her phone. Ray took over the task of staging the broadcast, which aired on January 30, 1946, as Lute Song called on Houseman's time and attention. Ray directed his first film, They Live by Night (1949), for RKO Pictures in the next year.

Later career

Ray came to a decline in the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s, and after 55 days at Peking, he did not direct again until the 1970s, although he continued to develop projects while in Europe.

He attempted to make an adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea first with Ingrid Bergman in mind and then Romy Schneider. Next Stop—Paradise, by Polish writer Marek Hlasko, was one of his options. He collaborated with novelist James Jones on a Western titled Under Western Skies in late 1963 in Paris, drawing on Hamlet.

Barrington Cooper, a London-based physician and psychiatrist who suggested script work as "occupational therapy," and he was compelled to address his alcoholism and heroin use. They formed Emerald Films, a film company under whose umbrella they produced two projects that were not among the few in Ray's European sojourn to come close to fruition. The Doctor and the Demons was a screenplay written by Dylan Thomas (whom Cooper also treated), influenced by Dr. Robert Knox's 1828 case and murderers Burke and Hare, who supplied him with corpses for dissection, and could be used in medical lessons. Ray moved from London to Zagreb thanks to a collaboration between Avala Film, Yugoslavia's biggest film company, to support the film and three others. Maximilian Schell, Susannah York, and Geraldine Chaplin were among the actors whose scripts were released on September 1, 1965, with Maximilian Schell, Susannah York, and Geraldine Chaplin in the lead, but Ray insisted on rewrites, including John Fowles, who died, and Gore Vidal, who wondered why he agreed in retrospect. Ray attempted to enlist US investment by Seven Arts and Warner Bros. on a budget that was increasing to upwards of $2.5 million. Accounts of the productions' demise vary, including the assertion that Ray was out of the country on the first day of shooting and the conclusion that he was paralysed by fear and indecision. Whatever the situation, the chances for a new, big Nicholas Ray film dissolved.

Only Lovers Left Alive, Dave Wallis' second book that Ray attempted to build as an Emerald Films venture. It may have been fitting for the director of Rebel Without A Cause, but it was announced in spring 1966 that it was to star the Rolling Stones as a dystopian parable in which adults have left society and teenagers have formed gangs to take charge. Allen Klein, the Stones' US manager, treated him and Ray to lavish visits to New York and later Los Angeles for meetings, then "conned" Ray to give up his rights to the property under "lucrative director's deal, with no one to direct, according to Cooper. (Jim Jarmusch, who befriended Ray a few years before Ray died, directed Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The tale of a young vampire couple, who of course are not young at all, is its only link to the Wallis novel or Ray's project is its name.

Ray maintained some degree of cash balance by creating and editing scripts, but not for films that didn't exist or aren't supposed to be. He made the German island Sylt his base of operations and imagined projects that might be shot there, including one to actress Jane Fonda and Paul Newman, entitled Go Where You Want, Die As You Must, which would also call for 2,000 extras. He attracted some of the younger generation of filmmakers while in Europe. Hanne Axmann, who had appeared in Schlöndorff's first film, and Ray broke a contract to sell Mord und Totschlag (1969), netting around one-third of the money as his fee and expenses. When he was in Paris, he often stayed with Barbet Schroeder, whose production company continued to find funding for one or another of Ray's projects. In the aftermath of the May 1968 demonstrations, he collaborated with Jean-Pierre Bastid and producer Henry Lange to film a three-part, one-hour film about contemporary young people during a period of controversy, rebellion, and rebellion that has yet to be announced. In the same way, Ray begged Schroeder's friend, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, to raise funds for L'Evadé (The Subtute), a tale about mixed and assumed identities, and Tchalgadjief, who had to be drafted out, but the company was unable to find money for the venture, and Tchalgadjieff.

Ellen Ray (unrelated to him) and her partners in Dome Films pleaded with him to direct her screenplay about a young man on trial for smoking marijuana, which was the reason for Ray's return to the United States in November 1969. Ray decided against The Defendant, instead of The Defendant, embarking on programmes concerning young Americans in turbulent times, including the Chicago Seven, establishing Leo Seven Production Company and attracting some financial interest from Michael Butler, the producer of the hit stage musical Hair. Conspiracy footage on nearly every current gauge of film stock, from 35mm to Super 8, he assembled documentary sequences, dramatized reconstructions of the criminal, and a collage-like multi-image video. He funded art by selling paintings he owned and obtained help from others in order to continue producing.

Originally from Chicago to New York City, and then, on Dennis Hopper's invitation, New Mexico in 1971, Ray began a new life as a teacher, taking an appointment at Harpur College in Binghamton. He discovered a cast and crew, students who were eager and imaginative, but also inexperienced. Ray and his class embarked on a big, feature-length project, devoting to the idea of learning by doing. Ray created a rotation in which a student would perform various roles behind or front of the camera, rather than the rigid division of labour that defined his Hollywood career. Some footage from which he incorporated into the new film—the Harpur film, which came to be titled We Can't Go Home Again—was similar to the Chicago Seven project, as well as video that was later processed and edited with a synthesizer provided by Nam June Paik. The photos were turned into multiple-image projects using up to five projectors and refilming the images in 35mm from a screen. Two documentaries include information about Ray's methods and classes as well as his fellow students: I'm A Stranger Here Myself (1975), directed by David Helpern, Jr., and Susan Ray's retrospective account, Don't Expect Too Much (2011).

Ray was invited to perform some video from the film at a conference in 1972. The audience was stunned to learn that Ray and his students were smoking marijuana together. An early version of We Can't Go Home Again was on display at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, revealing an abiding lack of enthusiasm. Ray shot additional scenes in Amsterdam immediately after the Cannes film festival in January 1974, and two months later in San Francisco, with the intention of attracting a distributor in 1976. At Ray's death in 1979, it was unfinished and without sales, but there were some prints of the 1973 version that were produced and screened at festivals and retrospectives through the 1980s. Oscilloscope Films released a restored version based on the 1973 film "Living on the Gothic Cut" in 2011.

Ray's deal with Binghamton was not renewed in the spring of 1973. He moved around a few times over the next few years, trying to raise funds and continue filming before returning to New York City. He continued to script scripts and try to produce film projects, the most viable of which was City Blues, before the production was shelved. At the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University, where his teaching assistant was graduate student Jim Jarmusch, he was also able to continue teaching acting and directing.

In the 1970s, Ray produced two short films. One of the Janitor's was a segment of the feature-length Wet Dreams (1974), also known as Dreams of Thirteen (1974). Ray's was also a personal film in which he played both a caretaker and a preacher, using a variety of shorts, most of which mocked pornography, and he used similar techniques in his previous film. Marco (1978), a second edition of Curtis Bill Pepper's first book, was based on the first few pages of a new book of the same name. Ray's film was included in the 2011 DVD/Blu-ray version of We Can't Go Home Again.

Ray and his son Tim created a documentary about a father-son relationship after contracting cancer and facing mortality. That belief, as well as Ray's desire to continue working, culminated in the participation of German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who had previously worked with Ray as an actor in a small but significant role in The American Friend (1977). Lightning Over Water (1980), also known as Nick's Film, juxtaposing film and video, reveals documentary footage and dramatic structures. It chronicles their progression in filmmaking, as well as recording Ray's last months, including directing and acting a scene with Ronee Blakley (then married to Wenders) based on King Lear. In June 1979, Ray's funeral was completed, and the film was completed.

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