Cecil B. DeMille Trivia
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70 free Cecil B. DeMille trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Cecil B. DeMille trivia quiz covers the whole career of the man Hollywood called Mr. DeMille: the playwright's son who acted for Charles Frohman, sketched a film company on the back of a menu with Jesse Lasky, rented a barn in Hollywood to shoot The Squaw Man in 1913, and went on to make 70 features and become the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. You will find questions on the silent-era hits and scandals (The Cheat, Male and Female, the 1923 Ten Commandments and its buried Egyptian sets), the sound-era spectacles (The Sign of the Cross, Cleopatra, Union Pacific, Reap the Wild Wind, Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on Earth) and the 1956 Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. It also covers Lux Radio Theatre and the one-dollar union fee that ended his broadcasting career, his cameo in Sunset Boulevard, his family (brother William, niece Agnes de Mille, son-in-law Anthony Quinn), his politics, his awards and the Golden Globe that bears his name. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on DeMille and his films, and each explanation adds one more detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the classic-film fans in your group chat.
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Q 01DeMille was born in a Massachusetts boarding house where his parents were escaping the summer heat of which home city?
New York
New York: his father had brought four private pupils along to Ashfield to tutor in Latin, Greek and mathematics, and the family was back in the city by the start of September.
Q 02Which director says the first film he ever saw was DeMille's 1952 circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg thought his father was taking him to a real circus and was angry to find only a film; its train wreck stayed with him, and as a boy he crashed his own electric trains for a home movie.
Q 03Which cult director's 2000 comedy Cecil B. Demented takes its title from a pun on DeMille's name?
John Waters
John Waters's comedy follows a guerrilla director who kidnaps a Hollywood star and forces her to act in his underground movie; Patricia Hearst, herself once kidnapped, plays a small part.
Q 04DeMille's father wrote plays with which Broadway impresario, whose Madame Butterfly became a Puccini opera?
David Belasco
David Belasco later hired the young DeMille to write a play, then staged it in 1911 as his own The Return of Peter Grimm and denied him the author's credit.
Q 05DeMille recalled tossing mud balls in the air as a boy for which Wild West show star, a neighbor, to shoot?
Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley was, by his account, a neighbor of the family in New Jersey; DeMille later put Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok on screen in his 1936 Western The Plainsman.
Q 06Before his 1900 Broadway debut, DeMille trained at which school, where his late father had taught?
American Academy of Dramatic Arts
American Academy of Dramatic Arts took him in 1898, the year he tried to leave a Pennsylvania military college to fight in the Spanish–American War and was turned away as under age.
Q 07Which Broadway producer, later lost on the Lusitania, cast DeMille in his 1900 stage debut, Hearts Are Trumps?
Charles Frohman
Charles Frohman saw him in his drama-school graduation play and gave him a small part; DeMille later wrote that he had become an actor simply in order to eat.
Q 08DeMille's first stage hit with producer Jesse Lasky was a 1912 operetta named after which state?
California
California opened in January 1912; less than two years later the pair's new film company sent DeMille west by train to make his first picture in the real one.
Q 09DeMille said which early film, seen on Sixth Avenue, showed him that movies could tell a story?
The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery was a 1903 Western; a decade later DeMille, who had never directed a film, set off across the country to shoot a Western of his own.
Q 10DeMille said he and Jesse Lasky sketched their new film company over lunch in 1913, on the back of what?
A restaurant menu
A restaurant menu at the Claridge Grill, by his account: tired of stage flops, DeMille had talked of going to Mexico to join a revolution until Lasky proposed making films instead.
Q 11DeMille's debut, The Squaw Man (1914), is usually given what place in Hollywood history?
Earliest full-length feature shot there
Earliest full-length feature shot there, by most accounts: the Western was an instant hit that returned many times its cost and secured the future of DeMille's new company.
Q 12Where did DeMille first plan to shoot The Squaw Man before deciding it lacked a Western look?
Flagstaff, Arizona
Flagstaff, Arizona struck him as colorless and dull, so he got back on the train for Los Angeles; the tales of a blizzard or a range war driving him out are legend.
Q 13What did DeMille rent to serve as the studio for The Squaw Man?
Q 21DeMille's silent-era trademarks included lion attacks, Roman orgies and what domestic fixture?
Bathtubs
Bathtubs: shooting Gloria Swanson's bath in Male and Female, he called out 'Prolong it! Relish the smell of the rosewater', yet by his own account his bathroom at home was plain, without an inch of onyx.
Q 22DeMille said the subject of his 1923 biblical epic came from a public contest run by which publication?
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times: its 1922 contest asked the public for film ideas, and the prize letter began 'You cannot break the Ten Commandments, they will break you'; one biographer thinks the project was already under way.
Q 23What became of DeMille's Egyptian city set for the 1923 Ten Commandments?
A barn
A barn, or half of one: the cast dressed in the horse stalls, and the building was later moved to the studio's new lot and now houses a film museum.
Q 14Squaw Man star Dustin Farnum chose what over a quarter of DeMille's company?
A cash salary
A cash salary: DeMille loved to tell how Farnum took $250 a week over a quarter-interest in the company that grew into Paramount Pictures, though the star's contract also gave him a quarter of the film's profits.
Q 15Which actress bought DeMille's longtime Los Feliz estate in 2017 for $24.5 million?
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie paid $24.5 million for a hilltop villa that had cost DeMille just under $28,000; he lived there until his death in 1959.
Q 16DeMille said that when exhibitors complained his shadowy lighting hid half the actors' faces, he named it after which painter?
Rembrandt
Rembrandt lighting was the name he wired to his partner Sam Goldwyn, who replied in relief that for Rembrandt lighting the exhibitors would pay double.
Q 17Which 1915 Sessue Hayakawa film won DeMille acclaim for its shadowy lighting?
The Cheat
The Cheat casts Sessue Hayakawa as a rich merchant who brands a society woman on the shoulder when she tries to buy her way out of their bargain, with much of the screen left in shadow.
Q 18What did DeMille call his mountain retreat, a sanctuary where only snakes could be shot?
Paradise
Paradise was the ranch he bought in 1916, three years into his film career; in 1963 his family turned it over to a foundation that cares for abused children.
Q 19DeMille cast his Moses for the 1956 Ten Commandments after seeing the actor's likeness to which artist's Moses?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo's marble Moses helped win the actor the part: the statue's beard was sketched onto his picture, and DeMille said that if he was good enough for the sculptor, he was good enough for him.
Q 20Which screenwriter was DeMille's exclusive writer for fifteen years and his long-time mistress?
Jeanie MacPherson
Jeanie MacPherson came to him in 1914 looking for acting work, having already directed a film herself; he hired her as a writer instead, and she scripted some thirty of his pictures.
Buried under the sand
Buried under the sand: DeMille joked that future archaeologists might think Egyptians had reached the Pacific, and since 2012 diggers have recovered pieces of his plaster sphinxes.
Q 24By DeMille's own estimate, how many people worldwide had seen his 1927 silent The King of Kings?
800 million
800 million was the figure he quoted, and he called it a minimum: he believed the film had been playing somewhere in the world without a day's interruption ever since 1927.
Q 25DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) holds what distinction at Grauman's Chinese Theatre?
First film to premiere there
First film to premiere there: Sid Grauman opened his new picture palace with it on May 18, 1927, and in 1941 asked DeMille back to leave his prints in the forecourt cement.
Q 26In 1919 DeMille and some partners started which kind of side business in Los Angeles?
A commercial airline
A commercial airline: Mercury Aviation flew thousands of passengers and offered scheduled flights before DeMille and his partners sold it after about two years.
Q 27Which comedian once lived in the house next door, which DeMille later bought and joined to his own mansion?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin had moved on by the time DeMille bought the house; he linked the two with a long breezeway and used the second as his office and screening room.
Q 28DeMille made his first three talking pictures, including Madam Satan, under a 1928 deal with which studio?
MGM
MGM got Dynamite, then Madam Satan, whose finale is a costume party aboard a lightning-struck zeppelin, and a third Squaw Man; the last two did poorly, and studio and director parted.
Q 29On DeMille's first talkie, the noisy camera left its soundproof booth inside a blanket-lined box nicknamed what?
The blimp
The blimp let the camera move again: sound engineers had shut it in an immobile booth, and DeMille, insisting that movies should move, had it boxed and padded with bed blankets instead.
Q 30DeMille's 1932 comeback at Paramount was which epic of ancient Rome?
The Sign of the Cross
The Sign of the Cross, his epic of Nero's Rome, was approved on a $650,000 budget, half of it put up by DeMille himself; it was a hit, and he stayed at Paramount for the rest of his career.