Donald Siegel ( ; October 26, 1912 – April 20, 1991) was an American film and television director and producer. Siegel was described by The New York Times as "a director of tough, cynical and forthright action-adventure films whose taut plots centered on individualistic loners". He directed the science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), as well as five films with Clint Eastwood, including the police thriller Dirty Harry (1971) and the prison drama Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He also directed John Wayne's final film, the Western The Shootist (1976). Early life Siegel was born in 1912 to a Jewish family in Chicago; his father was a mandolin player. Siegel attended schools in New York and later graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, in England. For a short time, he studied at Beaux Arts in Paris, but left at age 20 and later went to Los Angeles. Career Siegel found work in the Warner Bros. film library after meeting producer Hal Wallis, and later rose to head of the Montage Department, where he directed thousands of montages, including the opening montage for Casablanca. In 1945, two shorts he directed, Star in the Night and Hitler Lives, won Academy Awards, which launched his career as a feature director. He directed whatever material came his way, often transcending the limitations of budget and script to produce interesting and adept works. He made the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), described by The Guardian in 2014 as a "fatalistic masterpiece" and "a touchstone for the sci-fi genre" which spawned three remakes. For television, he directed two episodes of The Twilight Zone, "Uncle Simon" (1963) and "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" (1964), and was the producer of The Legend of Jesse James (1965). He worked with Eli Wallach in The Lineup, Elvis Presley and Dolores del Río in Flaming Star (1960), with Steve McQueen in Hell Is for Heroes, and Lee Marvin in the influential The Killers (1964) before directing five of Eastwood's films that were commercially successful in addition to being well received by critics. These included the action films Coogan's Bluff and Dirty Harry, the Albert Maltz-scripted Western Two Mules for Sister Sara, the American Civil War melodrama The Beguiled, and the prison-break picture Escape from Alcatraz. He was a considerable influence on Eastwood's own career as a director, and Eastwood's film Unforgiven is dedicated "for Don and Sergio". He