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George Cooper Stevens (December 18, 1904 – March 8, 1975) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. [1] He received two Academy Awards and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1953. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for A Place in the Sun (1951), and Giant (1956).
- Overview
- Early work
- Swing Time, Gunga Din, and Woman of the Year
George Stevens (born December 18, 1904, Oakland, California, U.S.—died March 8, 1975, Lancaster, California) American director known for films that exhibited intelligence, great humanism, and brilliant camera techniques. His classic movies include the screwball comedy Woman of the Year (1942), the action-adventure Gunga Din (1939), and the dramas A...
Stevens, who was born to professional actors, began performing onstage at the age of five. He remained in his father’s theatrical troupe as an actor and, eventually, a stage manager. While still a teenager, he entered the film industry as a cameraman, and in the early 1920s he became a cinematographer at Hal Roach Studios. His first production there was the Laurel and Hardy short Roughest Africa (1923). Stevens shot a number of other two-reelers starring the comedy duo, including Sugar Daddies (1927), Two Tars (1928), and Below Zero (1930).
In 1933 Stevens directed his first feature, The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble, a B-film for Universal. The following year, at RKO, he made the low-budget romantic comedy Bachelor Bait with Stuart Erwin and Rochelle Hudson, and Kentucky Kernels, a Bert Wheeler–Robert Woolsey farce, with George (“Spanky”) McFarland, Noah Beery, and Margaret Dumont. Wheeler and Woolsey returned for the crime comedy The Nitwits (1935), which also featured Betty Grable. Laddie (1935) was nostalgic Americana, with John Beal and Gloria Stuart.
In 1935 Stevens was given his first high-profile assignment, Alice Adams, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It starred Katharine Hepburn as a lonely small-town woman who tries desperately to become a member of the elite social circle; Fred MacMurray was her upper-class beau and Hattie McDaniel her hired maid. The film was a box-office hit, and it received an Academy Award nomination for outstanding production. In addition, Hepburn earned an Oscar nod for her nuanced performance. Stevens’s last credit from 1935 was Annie Oakley, with Barbara Stanwyck as the legendary markswoman and Preston Foster as her sharpshooting sweetheart. It was an entertaining if fanciful biopic. Stevens had even more success with Swing Time (1936), a classic musical that many consider the best teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; the Jerome Kern–Dorothy Fields score, which included such songs as “The Way You Look Tonight” and “Bojangles of Harlem,” was especially notable.
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Stevens’s string of hits ended with Quality Street (1937), a tasteful but rather bland adaptation of the J.M. Barrie play. It starred Hepburn as an “old maid” who tricks a former beau (Franchot Tone) into falling in love with her. Moviegoers also largely avoided A Damsel in Distress (1937), a musical that featured Astaire but not Rogers, who was replaced by Joan Fontaine. The film, however, was praised for the “Fun House” number, which earned Hermes Pan an Oscar for best dance direction, and for the comedy of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Stevens then directed Rogers (sans Astaire) in Vivacious Lady (1938); she played a nightclub singer who weds a professor (James Stewart) who tries to keep the marriage a secret; Charles Coburn and Beulah Bondi provided comic support. A box-office hit, the screwball comedy ended Stevens’s slump.
Stevens had even more success with Gunga Din, which was one of the best films in 1939, a year known for its numerous classic motion pictures. The action adventure, which was inspired by the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name, follows a trio of maverick British sergeants (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) as they fend off an attack on their outpost in 19th-century colonial India. The film was noted for Stevens’s direction and the fine acting, especially that of Sam Jaffe as the always solicitous Gunga Din, an Indian water carrier who longs to become a British soldier. Vigil in the Night (1940), from an A.J. Cronin novel, featured Carole Lombard as a nurse who dedicates her life to the poor denizens of a remote hospital ward after her sister (Anne Shirley), who is also a nurse, accidentally causes a patient’s death. The grim drama was atypical for Lombard, who was better known for her comedies, and the film was a box-office failure, despite its uplifting conclusion.
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- Michael Barson
Childhood & Early Life. George Stevens was born on December 18, 1904, in Oakland, California to Landers Stevens and Georgie Cooper. Both his parents were stage actors and had their own theatre company, Ye Liberty Playhouse, in Oakland. His uncle was the drama critic Ashton Stevens.
In 1922 Stevens' parents abandoned live theater and moved their family, which consisted of George and his older brother John Landers Stevens (later to be known as Jack Stevens), south to Glendale, California, to find work in the movie industry.
- December 18, 1904
- March 8, 1975
Jul 13, 2005 · After moving to RKO in 1933, Stevens started work on a series of highly regarded light-hearted feature entertainments, including one of the first Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and the...
George Cooper Stevens (December 18, 1904 – March 8, 1975) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. He received two Academy Awards and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1953.
Mar 10, 2011 · Beginning his career as an assistant cameraman and gag writer for low-budget westerns and Laurel & Hardy comedy shorts in the 1920s and early 1930s, George Stevens eventually progressed through the ranks to become one of classic Hollywood's most reliable producer-directors, earning five Academy Award nominations as Best Director and winning the ...
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