Biography for
Leo McCarey

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Date of Birth

3 October 1898, Los Angeles, California, USA

Date of Death

5 July 1969, Santa Monica, California, USA (emphysema)

Birth Name

Thomas Leo McCarey

Spouse

Stella Martin

(? - ?)

Trivia

He is responsible for the original teaming of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, though Hal Roach claimed it later and is now sometimes erroneously given credit.

Director/writer with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, W.C. Fields, and The Marx Brothers.

Brother of director Ray McCarey.

Child: Virginia Mary McCarey (c. 1927).

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 739-747. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

French director Jean Renoir once said that no other Hollywood director understood people better than McCarey.

He accused Cary Grant of ripping off his persona while shooting The Awful Truth (1937), saying that the star's style and personality was just like his. McCarey and Grant worked together several times after that but never fully extinguished their long-standing antagonism resulting from McCarey's comments.

He is among an elite group of seven directors who have won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Orig/Adapted). The others are Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, James L. Brooks, Peter Jackson and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (the brothers co-produced, co-directed and co-wrote No Country for Old Men (2007) with each other).

He is the first director to win three major categories at the Academy Awards--Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing, Original Story, for )Going My Way (1945)_.

Directed 6 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Ralph Bellamy, Irene Dunne, Maria Ouspenskaya , Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Ingrid Bergman. Crosby and Fitzgerald won for their performances in Going My Way (1944).

Biography in: "American National Biography." Supplement 1, pp. 392-393. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

In August 2006, an Oscar statuette described as McCarey's Best Director award for Going My Way (1944) was going to be auctioned online, and was expected to sell for at least $100,000 (US). The auction was canceled after the award was found to be counterfeit. McCarey's daughter said she still had all three of her father's Oscars. The base was authentic, but the original nameplate had been removed and replaced with a fake one. The statuette also weighed about a pound more than a real one.

He is the first director to win three major categories at the Academy Awards--Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing, Original Story, for Going My Way (1944).

Graduated from law school, passed the California bar and was a practicing criminal defense attorney for a short time before entering the movie business.

According to director Edward Dmytryk, who worked for him as an editor, McCarey never forgot a slight. He once told Dmytryk that early in his career Paramount had humiliated him by unceremoniously throwing him off the lot the moment a picture he was making for them was completed. After he became successful Paramount hired him for several more pictures, but McCarey got his revenge, he told Dmytryk, because "every picture I make for Paramount costs them a half-million more than it should".

Personal Quotes

"You can really call Irene Dunne 'The First Lady of Hollywood', because she's the first real lady Hollywood has ever seen."

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