Leo McCarey

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

Leo McCarey was born on October 3, 1896 in Los Angeles, California, USA as Thomas Leo McCarey.

During the period he was under contact at Hal Roach Studios between 1923 and 1929, McCarey supervised the production of about 300 comedy shorts including two-reelers of Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chase.

He has directed seven films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Mighty Like a Moose (1926), Big Business (1929), Duck Soup (1933), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), The Awful Truth (1937) and Going My Way (1944). He has also production supervised one film that is in the registry: Pass the Gravy (1928).

Corresponding Secretary for the Catholic Motion Picture Guild of America. The two other corresponding secretaries for the organization were, at the time, Ina Mae Merrill and June Collyer (per the 1931 Motion Picture Almanac).

Directed five Academy Award Best Picture nominees: Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Awful Truth (1937), Love Affair (1939), Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945). Going My Way won Best Picture in 1944.

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.

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).

He was a director and writer, known for An Affair to Remember (1957), Going My Way (1944) and Love Affair (1939). He was married to Stella Martin.

In The Godfather (1972), his name appears outside of Radio City Music Hall, which is playing his popular film The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), as Michael is walking with Kay and reads about his father's attempted assassination from a newspaper headline.

The opening sequences of Nickelodeon (1976) in which Ryan O'Neal's character, Leo Harrigan, a lawyer who intentionally loses a case and is chased out of the courtroom by his enraged client, are inspired by actual events that happened to McCarey, who was once a criminal defense lawyer and was defending a wife-beater who chased him out of the courtroom and down the street.

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.

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

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.