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:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)