Garson Kanin(1912-1999)
- Writer
- Director
- Additional Crew
Garson Kanin has worked as an actor on stage and as a director on
Broadway and in Hollywood, but his best-known work is as a writer.
During the Great Depression, he dropped out of high school to help
support his family by working as a musician and later as a comedian. He
attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts from 1932 to 1933. He
briefly worked as an actor on Broadway following his studies but then
worked as an assistant to the Broadway director George Abbot. In 1937,
he joined Samuel Goldwyn's staff but left after a year because he had
not been given any directing assignments. He was signed by RKO and
there directed such films as The Great Man Votes (1939) and Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), but he soon became
frustrated by the lack of control he had over his films under the
studio system. When he was drafted during World War II, he made
documentary films for the War Information and Emergency Manpower
offices. One of them, co-directed by Carol Reed, The True Glory (1945), won an Academy
Award for Best Documentary. During the war years, Kanin began writing
stories and plays as well. After the war, he directed his play "Born
Yesterday" on Broadway, which he later adapted for the screen. He and
his wife, Ruth Gordon, collaborated on four screenplays, including Adam's Rib (1949)
and Pat and Mike (1952). They stopped working on scripts together for the sake of
their marriage after 1952, but in 1979 they co-wrote one more, the TV
film Hardhat and Legs (1980). Kanin and Gordon were never under contract by any studio
as writers. They wrote the scripts on their own and sold them to
interested Hollywood studios.