Ernst Lubitsch (born January 29, 1892 in Berlin; died November 30, 1947 in Los Angeles, California, USA) was a German film director and actor who acquired US citizenship.

After enjoying his first successes as a director in Germany, he moved to Hollywood in the 1920s. There he made a name for himself as a director of cultivated, elegant "salon comedies"; Film critics later described their special charm as the “Lubitsch touch”.

Among his best known works are Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Heaven Can Wait (1943).

Lubitsch was known as a strict, very decisive director who left his actors little room for interpretation. Both Mary Pickford and fellow directors Josef von Sternberg and Clarence Brown felt that the actors were "playing Lubitsch" on screen rather than bringing their own personalities.

Many of his films are also characterized by the fact that he left certain processes and events of the film plot to the imagination of the viewer. He said: „Every good film is filled with mysteries. Unless a director leaves a few things unsaid, it's a lousy movie.“

Writing about Lubitsch's work, critic Michael Wilmington observed:

At once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well.

Lubitsch touch

Biographer Scott Eyman attempted to characterize the famed "Lubitsch touch":

With few exceptions Lubitsch's movies take place neither in Europe nor America but in Lubitschland, a place of metaphor, benign grace, rueful wisdom... What came to preoccupy this anomalous artist was the comedy of manners and the society in which it transpired, a world of delicate sangfroid, where a breach of sexual or social propriety and the appropriate response are ritualized, but in unexpected ways, where the basest things are discussed in elegant whispers; of the rapier, never the broadsword... To the unsophisticated eye, Lubitsch's work can appear dated, simply because his characters belong to a world of formal sexual protocol. But his approach to film, to comedy, and to life was not so much ahead of its time as it was singular, and totally out of any time.

In 1946, he received an Honorary Academy Award for his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture. He was nominated three times for Best Director.

The Ernst-Lubitsch-Prize, a German Comedy prize, was established in 1958 in an effort of Billy Wilder to keep the memory of his friend alive.

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director three times for The Patriot (1928), The Love Parade (1929), and Heaven Can Wait (1943).

In 1946, shortly before his death, he received an Honorary Academy Award for his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture.