adjective
Arousing awe or fear, formidable; commanding respect or reverence.
In "Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King," Brooklyn College film historian Foster Hirsch weaves interviews with industry players and family members into a straightforward chronology of Preminger's wide-ranging career. This comprehensive biography of the redoubtable impresario is the first since Preminger's ghostwritten account in 1977. It begins not in Vienna, where Preminger hinted that he was born, but in the "depressed backwater" of Wiznitz, Poland. As the book often demonstrates, circumstance was rarely an obstacle. In 1915, when Otto was 10, his father, an ambitious lawyer, relocated the family to Vienna, where he prosecuted insurgents on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—a formidable rise, considering that he was a Jew who refused to convert to Catholicism.
—Liz Brown Book Review of Otto Preminger by Foster Hirsch Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007
