Life and Career
Cummings was born in New York City. His father of screenwriter, Irving Cummings, Jr.
Cummings started his acting career in his late teens on Broadway stage in his late teens, and appeared with the legendary Lillian Russell. He entered into movies in 1909 and quickly became a popular leading man. Few of the films he made as an actor are easily available, except for Buster Keaton's first feature film, The Saphead (1920), in which Cummings plays a crooked stockbroker and Fred Niblo's film Sex (1920), one of the first films to depict a new phenomenon in 1920s America, the Flapper. Both films are readily available on home video, as well as The Round-Up (1920), a Western drama starring Roscoe Arbuckle (with the famous tagline "Nobody loves a fat man") and featuring Wallace Beery. Around that time, he started to direct action movies and occasional comedies.
In 1934, Cummings directed Grand Canary, and in 1929, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of In Old Arizona.
Cummings was known for the big splashy 1930s Technicolor musicals with popular leading ladies such as Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, and Shirley Temple (Little Miss Broadway, 1938) he directed at 20th Century Fox.
In 1943, as part of the 50th anniversary of the birth of the motion picture industry, Cummings was awarded the Thomas A. Edison Foundation Gold Medal for outstanding achievement in the arts and sciences.
Read more about this topic: Irving Cummings
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