Early Life and Career
Bern was born Paul Levy to a Jewish family in Wandsbek, which was then a town in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein (now a district of the city of Hamburg). In 1899 Bern's family emigrated to the United States, and eventually settled in New York City.
Bern pursued a career in acting on the stage and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He later pursued other aspects of theater production. He eventually moved to Hollywood and worked as a writer and director for various, smaller film companies. This led to his working full-time as a producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the major studio of the time.
The star-studded film Grand Hotel, released six days after Bern's death, won the Best Picture Academy Award for 1931–32. Bern and Irving Thalberg produced the film, although neither was listed in the film credits (in the early 1930s MGM did not list their films' producers in their credits). However, the award was presented solely to Thalberg, and Bern was excluded.
Read more about this topic: Paul Bern
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: “he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.””
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)