I am deeply grateful to International Database (IMDb) for access to its abunance of information resources.

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People would come to his door looking for him, and as few people knew what he looked like, he would tell them that “Stanley Kubrick isn’t home.”

He joined with directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack and George Lucas in forming the Film Foundation.

He was considered to be a well-read man with an extreme attention to detail. For his aborted film project on Napoléon Bonaparte, he had one of his assistants go to various bookstores to acquire every book he could find on the French emperor, and he returned with well in excess of 100. Kubrick read them all and astonished his associates with his level of retention. When working on a battlefield scene, he even examined an historical painting of the battle so he could note exactly what the weather was in the painting and make sure to film the battle on a day with similar weather patterns.

At the age of 16, he snapped a photograph of a news vendor in New York the day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. He sold the photograph to Look magazine, which printed it. The magazine eventually hired him as an apprentice photographer while he was still in high school.

Was an avid feline lover, once having 16 of them at one point. He would often let his cats lay around his editing room after filming completed as his way of making up for time he lost with them while he was working.

First grew his famous beard during the making of “2001:A Space Odyssey”. He kept the beard for the rest of his life and kept his hair long.

Due to his poor grades in high school (67% average) he was not accepted to a university. Although he never enrolled, he would sit in during classes at Columbia University.

By the age of thirteen, he had become passionate about photography, chess and jazz drumming.

Among his eccentricities was calling people multiple times a day whenever he had an idea about something, even if it was in the middle of the night. Kubrick himself was a night owl who rarely slept more than a few hours.

Used to skip school to take in double-features at the cinema.

His next project after Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was to be A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), which was taken over by Steven Spielberg. It is dedicated to Kubrick’s memory.

Refused to talk about his movies on set as he was directing them and never watched them when they were completed.

Legendary director Billy Wilder was a great admirer of Kubrick, and claimed that Kubrick “never made a bad picture.” Wilder also once told Cameron Crowe that the first half of Full Metal Jacket (1987) was “the best picture I’ve ever seen.”.

One of his favorite films was Eraserhead (1977) directed by David Lynch.

According to his close friend Michael Herr, he watched The Godfather (1972) over ten times and said it was probably the greatest film ever made.

Kubrick’s favorite pastime was chess and he was said to be a master at it.
Many crew members and actors found themselves on the losing end of chess matches with him.

According to his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, the family name is pronounced like “Que-brick,” rather than like “koo-brick”.

According to biographer Michael Herr, Kubrick was often noted for wanting to stick to each word of dialogue without changing it or an actor adding lines of his own. The two exceptions were Peter Sellers (with whom he worked on Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)) and R. Lee Ermey (from Full Metal Jacket (1987)).

He was a big fan of American sitcoms Seinfeld (1989), Roseanne (1988) and The Simpsons (1989). He was also a fan of American football and would have his friends in America tape games and send them to him. In addition to being a sports fan, he was fascinated by the craft of television commercials. He was particularly impressed by how they could effectively tell a story in 30 seconds.

The only author that Kubrick worked with personally was Arthur C. Clarke for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Wore a suit and tie every day while directing until the 1970s, when he began to dress in casual work clothes. His wife claimed he didn’t like choosing what to wear, and had a wardrobe full of identical shirts and pants.

His dislike of his early film Fear and Desire (1952) is well known. He went out of his way to buy all the prints of it so no one else could see it.

He had a well-known fear of flying, but he had to fly quite often early in his career. Because of his hysteria on planes, he simply tried to lessen the amount of times he flew. According to Malcolm McDowell, Kubrick listened to air traffic controllers at Heathrow Airport for long stretches of time, and he advised McDowell never to fly.

According to his wife Christiane Kubrick, he would screen every movie he could get ahold of. One of his favorites was The Jerk (1979). He considered making Eyes Wide Shut (1999) a dark sex comedy with Steve Martin in the lead. He even met with Martin to discuss the project.

He considered Elia Kazan the best American director of all time. His list of favorite directors included at various times Federico Fellini, David Lean, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, François Truffaut, and Max Ophüls.

Was a close friend of Steven Spielberg.