The Awful Truth

Leo McCarey was born in 1898 in Los Angeles and began his film career in the silent era, working as a gag writer and director for Hal Roach Studios in the 1920s, where he is widely credited with pairing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as a comedy team. His directing method, carried into features, favored improvisation: he preferred to arrive on set with a situation rather than a finished script and let his actors discover the scene in the moment. That approach produced two of Cary Grant's most acclaimed comedic performances. The Awful Truth (1937), starring Grant and Irene Dunne, won McCarey the Academy Award for Best Director and is considered a founding text of the screwball genre, its dialogue and physical comedy substantially improvised on set. Twenty years later, McCarey directed Grant again in An Affair to Remember (1957), a lush romantic drama opposite Deborah Kerr that was itself a remake of McCarey's own 1939 film Love Affair, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. McCarey's other major works include the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933) and Going My Way (1944), for which he won two additional Academy Awards, for directing and for writing the original story, along with a Best Picture win as producer. His body of work spans nearly every major American comic register of the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1969 in Santa Monica, California. McCarey is remembered as one of the defining architects of American screen comedy's tonal range, and his two very different films with Cary Grant — one a brittle marital farce, the other an unabashed tearjerking romance — demonstrate the breadth of Grant's range under a director he trusted to improvise.