Garson Kanin - Film Career

Film Career

His first film as a director was A Man to Remember (1938), which The New York Times considered one of the ten best films of 1938. Kanin was twenty-six at the time. Other directing credits include "The Great Man Votes " (1939), My Favorite Wife (1940), "They Knew What they Wanted" (1940) and "Tom Dick and Harry" (1941).

Mr. Kanin's Hollywood career was interrupted by the draft. He served in the United States Army from 1941-1945. During this time Kanin, with Carol Reed, co-directed General Dwight D. Eisenhower's official record of the Allied Invasion, the Academy-award-winning documentary "The True Glory". (It was also during this time he began writing what would become his greatest play, "Born Yesterday").

Kanin's best-remembered screenplays, however, were written in collaboration with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon, whom he married in 1942. Together, they wrote the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film comedies Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), as well as A Double Life (1947), starring Ronald Colman, all directed by George Cukor.

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