Bert Conway

Born in Orange, New Jersey, Conway was the son of vaudevillians -- his father was an acrobat and juggler, his mother, a singer and pianist. Conway studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School in New York. In 1937, he joined the Group Theater as an assistant stage manager and had a walk-on part as a boxing arena employee in Harold Clurman's original 1937 staging of Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy." Within a year, Conway was playing a lead, as a reform school youth in "Dance Night," staged by Lee Strasberg. After serving in the Army during World War II, Conway headed for Hollywood, where he played minor parts in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Elia Kazan's interracial drama Pinky (1949), and had small roles in other films. Conway began directing in 1947 at the Actors Lab in Hollywood, and he directed the first interracial production of "Golden Boy" for the Negro Art Theater in Los Angeles. But in 1950, caught up in the Hollywood blacklist era and finding film job offer