Korda helped found the Hungarian film industry and worked in the studios of Vienna, Berlin and Hollywood before becoming a naturalized and, in 1943, a knighted Englishman. Together with his brothers Vincent (a production designer) and Zoltan (a director), Korda helped define the cinematic image of the British Empire. (His taste for pomp and pageantry had become apparent as early as 1920, when he filmed an adaptation of Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper" for an Austrian company.)
After a stay in Berlin Korda was invited to Hollywood in 1926, where he soon realized that the talents of his actress-wife Maria Farkas were in greater demand than his own. He nevertheless acquired a reputation for historical costume dramas before returning to Europe in 1930.
In Paris, Korda collaborated with his brother Vincent on "Marius" (1931) before moving to England and establishing his own company, London Film Productions, in 1932. Within two years he was being hailed as the most important figure in British film, the man who had beaten Hollywood at its own game by directing and producing the lavish and successful spectacle, "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1932). Although he was to direct several more films, including the memorable "Rembrandt" (1936), Korda became increasingly involved with production duties, handing over the directorial reigns to Zoltan.
Vincent completed the fraternal team, though the brothers' work together was punctuated by loud disagreements worked out on the studio floor in a mixture of Hungarian, German and English. One of their arguments concerned the glorification of the British Empire, a theme in "Sanders of the River" (1935), "Drums" (1938) and "The Four Feathers" (1939). Even a film set during the Russian Revolution and featuring Marlene Dietrich, "Knight without Armour" (1937), emphasized the aplomb of a British intelligence agent, played by Robert Donat, and the public-schoolboy decency of a young Bolshevik sympathizer, as portrayed by John Clements.
In the late 1930s, Korda's patriotic feelings for his adopted country expressed themselves in filmed warnings of imminent threats from abroad: 1936's "Things to Come" opened with a grimly realistic air raid on a city uncomfortably like London; later films relayed a similar message--with the Spanish Empire or Napoleon's fleet standing in for more contemporary expansionist forces--to other audiences, including a neutral United States. (Neither was Korda's patriotism limited to the celluloid realm; as well as pawning his life insurance agreement to finance a propaganda film about the Royal Air Force, he also, according to historians of espionage, made his North American offices available to members of Britain's intelligence organizations.)
Korda, whose second wife was actress Merle Oberon, helped launch the careers of Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton and Robert Donat, among others. He played a significant part in earning a world reputation for British films, and in the process captured a heroic image of the British Empire on celluloid.