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George Cukor: Director George Cukor
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Cukor was born in New York City on July 7, 1899. His parents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants who worked in the legal profession. As a teenager, Cukor started acting in plays. After undergoing military training, he became a stage assistant in Chicago in 1918, then returned to New York and was a stage manager on Broadway the following year. In the early 1920s, he directed a summer stock company in Rochester, New York, in which Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery began their careers. From 1926 to 1929, Cukor became a successful Broadway director of plays such as The Great Gatsby.
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When Hollywood began to recruit New York theater talent for sound films, Cukor answered their call and moved there in 1929. His first job was as a dialog director at Paramount Pictures for the film River of Romance (1929), followed by All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) at Universal Pictures. He then co-directed three films at Paramount before making his solo debut directing Tallulah Bankhead in Tarnished Lady (1931). Cukor left Paramount after a legal dispute resulting from his dismissal from an earlier Paramount film, One Hour With You (1932), and went to work with David O. Selznick at RKO Studios.
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Cukor continued working until 1981; his last film was "Rich and Famous", a remake of "Old Acquaintance" (1943), starring Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset. Among his latter-day hits were three Judy Holliday vehicles, "Born Yesterday" (for which she won an Oscar in 1950), "The Marrying Kind" (1952) and the delightful "It Should Happen to You" (1954); the Tracy-Hepburn comedy "Pat and Mike" (1952); Judy Garland's comeback, "A Star is Born" (1954, his first color film and a musical remake of his 1932 "What Price Hollywood?"); and Audrey Hepburn's immensely popular "My Fair Lady", which won Cukor his only Best Director Oscar (1964). He continued mixing hits with misses, including Marilyn Monroe's unsuccessful "Let's Make Love" (1960) and the expensive Russian-American flop "The Blue Bird" (1976). He was ... directing Monroe in "Something's Got to Give" (1962) at the time of her death.
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Beginning as an assistant stage manager in 1918, Cukor worked as a stage director and manager in Rochester, New York, and in New York City before going to Hollywood in 1929, at the beginning of the sound era in motion pictures. He was the dialogue director for the motion pictures River of Romance (1929) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Tarnished Lady (1931) was the first film he directed, and he achieved his first major success in 1933 with Little Women. His other commercial and artistic achievements include Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1935), Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Camille (1936), Romeo and Juliet (1936), Holiday (1938), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Keeper of the Flame (1942), Gaslight (1944), and Born Yesterday (1950).
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Film director George Cukor (1899-1983) gets the American Masters treatment in this documentary from the acclaimed PBS series. Few directors from Hollywood's Golden Age can match the list of Cukor's achievements, which included What Price Hollywood, David Copperfield, Camille, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, The Women, A Double Life, Adam's Rib, Born Yesterday, Pat and Mike, and the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, essentially the same story as What Price Hollywood.
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Cukor was the original director of the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, but lead actor Clark Gable got him removed because he complained that Cukor paid too much attention to the female roles. Cukor, replaced by Victor Fleming, received no credit on the final cut of the box-office behemoth. Yet the film's stars, Vivian Leigh and Olivia DeHavilland, continued to get instruction from Cukor by visiting his home during filming. "He was my last hope of ever enjoying the picture," Leigh later said.
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Director George Cukor