Joseph Feury (born Joseph Fioretti) is an American film and television producer, documentary filmmaker, painter, actor, stage dancer, and

Academy Award The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence ...

winner. He is the husband of

winning actress/director

Lee Grant Lee Grant (born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal; October 31, during the mid-1920s) is an American actress, documentarian, and director. In a career spanning over seven decades, she won an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Directors Guil ...

and step-father to

Tony Award The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ce ...

winner

Dinah Manoff Dinah Manoff (born January 25, 1956) is an American stage, film, and television actress and television director. She is best known for her roles as Carol Weston on '' Empty Nest,'' Elaine Lefkowitz on ''Soap'', Marty Maraschino in the film '' Gr ...

. He and Grant are the parents of Belinda Fioretti.

Life and work

Joseph Fioretti grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood of

Wilmington, Delaware Wilmington is the List of municipalities in Delaware, most populous city in the U.S. state of Delaware. The city was built on the site of Fort Christina, the first Swedish colonization of the Americas, Swedish settlement in North America. It lie ...

. He contracted

polio Poliomyelitis ( ), commonly shortened to polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Approximately 75% of cases are asymptomatic; mild symptoms which can occur include sore throat and fever; in a proportion of cases more severe ...

at the age of 16, and after graduating from High School (1957), became a

plumber A plumber is a tradesperson who specializes in installing and maintaining systems used for potable (drinking) water, hot-water production, sewage and drainage in plumbing systems.

like his father. Fioretti preferred to start a ballet education and found a love of the theater. He auditioned for ''

My Fair Lady ''My Fair Lady'' is a musical theatre, musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play ''Pygmalion (play), Pygmalion'' and on the Pygmalion (1938 film), 1938 film ...

'', and went on tour with a musical version of ''

Ninotchka ''Ninotchka'' is a 1939 American romantic comedy film made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by producer and director Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. It was written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, b ...

'' in the early 1960s. There, Fioretti met the actress and future Academy Award winner

, whom he married in 1962. He earned his living at this time with an advertising agency. Fioretti, who wanted to sound less Italian, started to use the name Feury, and began to be artistic in many ways. Although

dyslexic Dyslexia (), previously known as word blindness, is a learning disability that affects either reading or writing. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writ ...

, he authored several screenplays, began painting for the first time in 1966, and began producing tightly budgeted

B-movies A B movie, or B film, is a type of cheap, low-budget commercial motion picture. Originally, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, this term specifically referred to films meant to be shown as the lesser-known second half of a double feature, s ...

in the early 1970s. From the 1980s, he was the producer of the films of his wife Lee Grant. For Grant's 1986 documentary on homelessness in the US under President

Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...

, ''

Down and Out in America Down most often refers to: * Down, the relative direction opposed to up * Down (gridiron football), in North American/gridiron football, a period when one play takes place * Down feather, a soft bird feather used in bedding and clothing * Downland ...

'', Feury and with his co-producer Milton Justice received an

Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature The Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film is an award for documentary films. In 1941, the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Academy Honorary Award, Special Awards to ''Kukan'' and ''Target for Tonight''. The ...

the following year. He went on to produce a number of documentary films and TV movies. The documentary film '' Baghdad ER'' took a look at the activities of US military surgeons in the Iraq war zone. Produced in conjunction with DCTV,

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

, and his longtime collaborators Roberta Morris Purdee and wife

, the film went on to win four

Emmys The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the year, each with their own set of rules and award categor ...

, a Peabody, and the Dupont-Columbia. In 2012, Joseph Feury began to professionally

paint Paint is a material or mixture that, when applied to a solid material and allowed to dry, adds a film-like layer. As art, this is used to create an image or images known as a painting. Paint can be made in many colors and types. Most paints are ...

and also worked as

draftsman A drafter (also draughtsman / draughtswoman in British and Commonwealth English, draftsman / draftswoman, drafting technician, or CAD technician in American and Canadian English) is an engineering technician who makes detailed technical drawi ...

. His works have been exhibited in galleries in

Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...

and across the United States. Grant colleagues such as

Alan Alda Alan Alda (; born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo; January 28, 1936) is an American actor. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner and a three-time Tony Award nominee, he is best known for playing Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pier ...

Joy Behar Josephine Victoria "Joy" Behar (; née Occhiuto; born October 7, 1942) is an American comedian, television host, and actress. She co-hosts the ABC talk show '' The View'', on which she has appeared since the beginning of the series. For her wor ...

and

Michael Douglas Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and film producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the ...

, a close friend of Feury's for decades, own works by Feury. His complete oeuvre was published in a book entitled ''Artworks of Joseph Fioretti''. In October 2019 Feury received a retrospective of his artwork at the

National Arts Club The National Arts Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and members club on Gramercy Park, Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 1898 by Charles DeKay, an art and literary critic of the ''New York Times'', to "stimulate, foster, and promote publi ...

in New York City.

Filmography

As producer unless otherwise stated: * 1969: '' Peyton Place'' (actor only) * 1970: ''The Pleasure Game'' * 1971: ''The Jesus Trip * 1976: ''The Stranger'' (short film) * 1983, 1989, 1992: ''

America Undercover ''America Undercover'' is a series of documentaries that aired on the cable television network HBO from 1983 through 2006. Within the series are several sub-series, such as ''Autopsy'', '' Real Sex'', and ''Taxicab Confessions''. History The ser ...

'' (documentary series) * 1984: ''A Matter of Sex'' (also screenplay participation) * 1986: '' Nobody's Child'' * 1986: ''

'' (documentary) * 1989: '' Staying Together '' * 1989: '' No Place Like Home'' * 1994: '' Seasons of the Heart'' * 1995: '' Last Summer in the Hamptons'' (actor) * 1997: ''Say It, Fight It, Cure It'' * 1993–2004: '' Intimate Portrait'' (TV documentary series) * 2005: ''

Going Shopping ''Going Shopping'' is a 2005 American romance film directed by Henry Jaglom and stars Victoria Foyt, Rob Morrow, Lee Grant, Mae Whitman, Juliet Landau and Summer Caffrey. Plot Cast * Victoria Foyt as Holly Gilmore * Rob Morrow as Miles ...

'' (actor) * 2005: ''... A Father... A Son... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'' (documentary) * 2006:'' Baghdad ER'' (documentary)

References

External links

*
Biography of Joseph Feury
at Delaware Today {{DEFAULTSORT:Feury, Joseph 20th-century American painters American documentary film producers American dancers American male film actors American people of Italian descent 1939 births Living people 21st-century American painters Polio survivors