Award-winning director David Pressman died of natural causes on August 29, 2011. He was 97.
A prolific television director who began his career in the medium’s infancy, Pressman had his career interrupted when he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
He turned to teaching and directing for the stage before returning to television for a lengthy tenure with the daytime drama One Life to Live.
Born in the eastern European city of Tiblisi, Georgia, on October 10, 1913, Pressman was nine years old when he came to the U.S. with his family, how were traveling musicians with the Russian Grand Opera Company.
A theater aficionado from a young age, Pressman scored a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he studied acting with Sanford Meisner.
Later, in Toronto, he began directing theater, and won awards with a socialist acting troupe called Theater for Action.
At the request of Meisner, he returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse as a teaching assistant. His students included Gregory Peck, Eli Wallach and Tony Randall.
Pressman joined the Communist Party during the 1930s. according to news reports, he later explained that he and many others in the arts were drawn to the Communist Party because it supported such integration, civil rights, socialized medicine and other ideas that were regarded as radical at the time.
During his more than 12 years as a teacher at the Neighborhood Playhouse, Pressman also acted in several Broadway productions.
Pressman was drafted into the U.S. Army during WWII. He fought for two years in Europe and earned two Purple Hearts.
After the war, he returned to the Neighborhood Playhouse and was asked to be an original member of the Actors Studio. Instead, he chose to pursue directing for live television, which was growing at the time.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s he received a Peabody Award for directing the live Actors Studio television show. Other shows he directed included Nash Airflyte Theatre, Treasury Men in Action and Cosmopolitan Theater.