Biographie

As a cinematographer at Hal Roach Studios, he is credited with saving the film career of young British comic Stan Laurel. Laurel's pale blue eyes would register as an unnatural white on orthochromatic film, the standard film in use at that time. Stevens knew of panchromatic film and was able to get a supply of it from Chicago. This film was sensitive to blue so that Laurel's eyes would photograph more naturally. Laurel would use Stevens for his short films at Roach. When Stan Laurel was teamed up with Oliver Hardy, the team make Stevens their cameraman of choice.

Directed 16 different actors in Oscar®-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn,Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, Jean Arthur, Oscar Homolka, Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes, Ellen Corby, Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, Brandon De Wilde, Jack Palance, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Mercedes McCambridge and Ed Wynn. Only Coburn and Winters won Oscars® for their performances in one of Stevens' movies.

To date, only one of four people to have won the Best Director Oscar® more than once without any of those films having won the Oscar® for Best Picture. His two wins are for Une place au soleil (1951) and Géant (1956), both starring Elizabeth Taylor. The other three individuals are Frank Borzage for directing L'Heure suprême ! (1927) and Bad Girl (1931), Ang Lee for directing Le secret de Brokeback Mountain (2005) and L'odyssée de Pi (2012), and Alfonso Cuarón for directing Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018).

Father of director George Stevens Jr..

Directed Shelley Winters in three different films: Une place au soleil (1951), Le journal d'Anne Frank (1959) and La plus grande histoire jamais contée (1965). Winters won the Academy Award® for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Petronella Van Daan in the second of these films.

[on CinemaScope] It's fine if you want a system that shows a boa constrictor to better advantage than a man.

[on La justice des hommes (1942)] I knew it was going to come off all along: it didn't have that element of hazard in it. It was more of an understood flight with a take-off time and an arrival time and not too much headwind.

[1967] I just knew that if you engaged the audience with a promise that something would develop, you were in business. If not, you had to contrive automatic ridiculousness continuously. Comedy, in this sense, is all about preparation. Things have to be arranged and set up - cause and effect - and if the cause is apparent to the audience, they'll stick with it until their sagacity is rewarded. It's their intelligence that foresees things, while the comic character doesn't.

If a director is lucky enough to work with Irene Dunne, his worries disappear. Every scene she's in matches; she's the film editor's delight. I would say she's just about as "careless" as George Arliss.

[on James Dean] All in all, it was a hell of a headache to work with him.