George Stevens

George Stevens (1904-1975), American film director, born in Oakland, California, who directed comedies in the 1930s and blockbusters in the 1950s. As a cinematographer in the 1920s, he filmed a number of the famous Laurel and Hardy shorts for the Hal Roach studio. In 1935 he directed his first major feature, the successful Alice Adams, with Katharine Hepburn in the title role. A string of financial and critical successes with Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracey, Carole Lombard, Ronald Colman, and Jean Arthur followed. Gunga Din (1939) is a distinguished example of Hollywood professionalism; Woman of the Year (1942) is an excellent example of the well-written, sophisticated comedy, and Talk of the Town (also 1942), shows his continuing sensitivity to the paying audience.

As a member of the Signal Corps during World War II, he was, along with other directors such as John Huston, one of those who filmed the consequences of the war in Europe. The sight of the concentration camps is said to have changed him and introduced a more sombre quality to his work. After one further film, I Remember Mama (1948), he adapted the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy as the Academy Award winning A Place in the Sun (1951), starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. It is generally considered his greatest achievement, a fine attempt to convey a complex work in visual terms.

He began to spend more time on individual projects, converting a genre novel into the serious allegorical western Shane (1953), and a play into The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). The latter was a disappointing attempt at a masterpiece, which nevertheless won Academy Awards for its photography, art direction, and the acting of Shelley Winters. The earlier Giant (1956, starring Rock Hudson and James Dean), although an Academy Award winner, was considered over-inflated, and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965, starring Max von Sydow), the story of Christ, which took five years to make, damaged his reputation, and he completed only one more film before his death.