Robert Wise

Robert Earl Wise was born in Winchester, Indiana, the youngest son of Olive R. (née Longenecker) and Earl W. Wise, a meat packer. He had an elder brother, David. The family moved to Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana, where Wise attended public schools. As a youth Wise's favorite pastime was going to the movies. As a student at Connersville High School, Wise wrote humor and sports columns for the school's newspaper and was a member of the yearbook staff and poetry club.

Wise initially sought a career in journalism and following graduation from high school attended Franklin College, a small liberal arts college south of Indianapolis, Indiana, on a scholarship. In 1933, due to the family's poor financial situation during the Great Depression, Wise was unable to return to college for his second year and moved to Hollywood to begin a lifelong career in the film industry. Wise's older brother, David, who had gone to Hollywood several years earlier and worked at RKO Pictures, found his younger brother a job in the shipping department at RKO. Wise worked odd jobs at the studio before moving into editing.

Wise began his film career at RKO as a sound and music editor. In the 1930s, RKO was a budget-minded studio with "a strong work ethic" and "willingness to take artistic risks", which was fortunate for a newcomer to Hollywood such as Wise. At RKO, Wise became an assistant to T.K. Wood, the studio's head sound-effects editor. Wise's first screen credit was a ten-minute short subject called A Trip through Fijiland (1935), which was made from RKO footage salvaged from an abandoned feature film.

As Wise gained experience, he became more interested in editing film content, rather than sound, and went to work for RKO film editor William "Billy" Hamilton. Wise's first film as Hamilton's assistant was Alfred Santell's Winterset (1936). Wise continued to work with Hamilton on other films, including Stage Door (1937), Having Wonderful Time (1938) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and 5th Ave Girl (1939), Hamilton and Wise, as assistant film editor, shared screen credit; it was Wise's first credit on a feature film. Wise's first solo film editing work was on Bachelor Mother (1939) and My Favorite Wife (1939).

At RKO, Wise worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane (1941) and was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing. Wise was the film's last living crew member. Though Wise worked as an editor on Citizen Kane, it is likely that while working on the film he became familiar with the optical printer techniques employed by Linwood Dunn, inventor of the practical optical printer, to produce effects for Citizen Kane such as the image projected in the broken snowglobe which falls from Kane's hand as he dies.

In Citizen Kane, Welles used a deep-focus technique, in which heavy lighting is employed to achieve sharp focus for both foreground and background in the frame. Wise later used the technique in films that he directed. Welles' Citizen Kane also influenced Wise's innovations in the use of sound in films such as The Set-Up (1949), where Wise limited music to in-film sources, and in Executive Suite (1954), which used no music. In addition, biographical films or biographical profiles of fictionalized characters such as Charles Foster Kane were often the subjects of Wise's later work, including Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), I Want to Live! (1958), The Sound of Music (1965), So Big (1953), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), among others. Wise also worked as editor on Welles' next film for RKO, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). While working as a film editor, Wise was called on to shoot additional scenes for the film. After Welles was dismissed from the studio, Wise continued editing films such as Seven Days Leave (1942), Bombardier (1943) and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), before he received his first directing assignment.

On May 25, 1942, Wise married actress Patricia Doyle. Throughout their long marriage, Wise and his first wife enjoyed entertaining and traveling, before she died of cancer on September 22, 1975. The couple had one son, Robert, who became an assistant cameraman. On January 29, 1977, Wise married Millicent Franklin. Millicent died on August 31, 2010, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles.

Wise had an expansive bungalow on the Universal Studios lot and owned a modern California beach house. He continued to screen films for personal enjoyment and had "final cut" decisions on his films.

Wise suffered a heart attack and was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, where he died of heart failure on September 14, 2005, four days after his 91st birthday.