Father Goose

Leslie Caron was born in 1931 near Paris, France, to a French father and an American mother who had herself been a dancer, and trained rigorously in ballet from childhood, joining the Ballet des Champs-Élysées as a teenager. She was discovered there by Gene Kelly, who cast her opposite himself in An American in Paris (1951), her film debut, which made her an international star at nineteen. She followed with a run of MGM musicals built around her dancing, most notably Lili (1953), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and Gigi (1958), directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1964 she starred opposite Cary Grant in Father Goose, a wartime comedy-adventure in which Grant played a boozy beachcomber recruited as a coastal lookout who is joined by Caron's stranded French schoolteacher and her young charges; the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Caron actively sought to move beyond musicals into dramatic work, succeeding notably in The L-Shaped Room (1962), for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress and received a further Academy Award nomination, playing a pregnant, unmarried woman in a London boarding house. She continued working in film, television, and theatre across subsequent decades, including work in France, and later wrote two volumes of memoir. Caron remains active into her nineties as one of the last surviving major stars of the classic MGM musical era. She is remembered both as the ballet-trained ingenue who defined a genre and as an actress who successfully reinvented herself in serious drama once the musical era faded.

Peter Stone was born in Los Angeles in 1930, the son of film producer John Stone, and became one of the few writers to move fluently between Broadway, television and Hollywood screenwriting at the highest level. He remains the only writer in history to win a competitive Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. Stone wrote two of the sharpest vehicles of Grant's final screen decade. Charade (1963), directed by Stanley Donen, gave Grant a role built around his age rather than around it — a man aware that he is nearly two decades older than Audrey Hepburn's character and openly uneasy about it, a joke Stone wrote directly into the dialogue. Father Goose (1964) went further, casting Grant as a scruffy, drunken South Pacific island-watcher rather than a polished leading man, and it won Stone the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (shared story credit with Frank Tarloff and S. H. Barnett). Grant himself called it one of his favorite performances precisely because it broke from the tailored image Stone knew audiences expected of him. Beyond his work with Grant, Stone wrote the book for the Broadway musical 1776 (1969), which won the Tony Award, and later the screenplay for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), a tense New York subway-hijack thriller far removed in tone from his comedies. His versatility across genres and media was unusual even by the standards of prolific studio-era writers. Stone died in Los Angeles in 2003. His two Grant scripts are still regularly cited as giving the actor his best and most self-aware late material.