Born October 3, 1896, (Thomas) Leo McCarey began in films as Assistant Director to horror legend Tod Browning in 1920, but soon found his niche as a comedy writer for Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies. He later brought Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together and guided their early joint career. By 1929 he was VP in charge of production for Hal Roach Studios.

He became a highly sought after director with the coming of sound and directed someof the biggest stars of the day, including Gloria Swanson, W. C. Fields and Harold Lloyd in some of their best reviewed films. One early highlight was the Marx Bros. classic, Duck Soup generally regarded as their best film.

In 1937 he directed two enduring masterpieces, Make Way for Tomorrow about the problems of old age in the pre-Social Security age, which he regarded as his finest film and the ultimate screenball comedy, The Awful Truth, which was the box-office smash Make Way for Tomorrow was not. When he won his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth he famously remarked “thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture”.

He was nominated for Best Original Story for 1939’s bittersweet Love Affair and 1940’s return to screwball comedy, My Favorite Wife, but he relegated the direction of the latter to Garson Kanin.

In 1944 he wrote, produced and directed the classic comedy,Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as priests with different outlooks, which made him the first director whose film won all three Oscar categories in the same year, although he is not officially credited with having won for producing. But then, who needs another Oscar when your percentage of profits when the year’s most successful film made you the highest paid individual in the country that year?

Click here to continue reading this article

Born January 27, 1921 in Denison, Iowa as Donna Belle Mullenger, the future Donna Reed was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout while attending Los Angeles City College.

Signed by MGM, she was in three films in 1941, her first year in films, including a major supporting turn in Shadow of the Thin Man with William Powell and Myrna Loy. In 1942 she would appear in major roles in two other films from long-running MGM series in The Courtship of Andy Hardy with Mickey Rooney and Calling Dr. Gillepsie with Lionel Barrymore. She made a strong impression that same year as Edward Arnold’s daughter in Eyes in the Night. Important roles in major MGM films soon followed, including 1943’s The Human Comedy and 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and They Were Expendable.

While returning from Mexico in 1945 where she went to obtain a quickie divorce from makeup artist William Tuttle, her husband of two years, she was bumped from her flight by an American serviceman. All on board the flight were killed. She then married producer Tony Owen with whom she had four children.

On loan to RKO, she starred opposite James Stewart in Frank Capra’s now classic 1947 film, It’s a Wonderful Life. From there it was back to MGM for one of that studio’s best films of 1947, Green Dolphin Street based on an enormously successful best-seller.

In fairly routine films until 1953, she was in two standout films that year, the domestic drama Trouble Along the Way in which she played her customary nice girl opposite John Wayne and From Here to Eternity in which she played against type as a hard-bitten prostitute, for which she won an Oscar.

Click here to continue reading this article