Ben Carré; French art director and painter who settled in the US. He designed sets for dozens of Hollywood films including The Blue Bird, Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, and A Night at the Opera. He was a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ben Carré was born in Paris in 1883. His father, a professional painter and decorator, died when Carré was 6. At 13, Carré left school to become an apprentice house-painting estimator. Finding his talent laid in painting rather than arithmetic, he took a job as an assistant scene painter at Atelier Amable, at the time one of the most important scenic art studios in Paris. One of his first jobs was painting a large-scale reproduction of the Paris World's Fair for London's Earl Court Exhibition Hall. Within 2 years he was designing and painting backgrounds for the Opera, the Comédie-Française, and Covent Garden in London. Like many stage designers of the era, Carré was attracted to the burgeoning film industry. At 22, he joined Gaumont as a scenic artist where he designed and painted sets and special effects. Shortly after his arrival at Gaumont, he overturned previous practice by insisting on painting his sets in color. Soon after, the rest of Gaumont's scenic artists followed suit, and other studios followed soon after. After 7 years as a scenic artist in Paris, Carré moved to the US in 1912 to work for the Eclair Film Company, based in NY. Carré was unimpressed by the quality of American production and was "miserable until [Maurice] Tourneur came along." After Tourneur emigrated from France in 1914, the pair worked on 31 films together. Their productions included The Wishing Ring, The Man of the Hour, The Ivory Snuffbox, and the Mary Pickford films.... He painted backgrounds for for many of MGM’s classic films including The Wizard of Oz... ...After retiring, Carré remained in LA with his wife Anne...He died of a heart attack May 28, 1978 at age 94. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carr%C3%A9] undefined

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