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Imake a lot of different movies and I love them all,’ said Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison, whose genre-hopping career took in such diverse features as In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair and Moonstruck. ‘The movies that address civil rights and social justice are the ones that are dearest to me.’
Born on 21 July 1926 in Toronto, Canada, Norman Frederick Jewison was raised Methodist but bullied by schoolmates who mistakenly thought he was Jewish because of his surname. At the end of his military service during World War Two, Jewison got another taste of social bigotry when he hitchhiked through the American south with its Jim Crow segregation. These experiences would inform the social dramas for which he became best known.