George Cukor

George Cukor came to Hollywood in 1929 after directing on the New York stage, and quickly established a reputation, across his years at MGM and elsewhere, as one of the studio system's finest directors of actors, credited with drawing career-defining performances from a long list of leading women. That reputation earned him the reductive and, in his view, unfair label of a "woman's director," which he resented as a dismissal of range he had also demonstrated with male stars and ensemble casts. Cukor's career included a brief, high-profile removal from "Gone with the Wind" (1939) early in production, and a body of work spanning sophisticated comedy, adapted literary drama, and later musicals. He worked repeatedly with Katharine Hepburn across eight films and with Cary Grant on three occasions in the years bridging screwball comedy and prestige drama. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for "My Fair Lady" (1964), after five earlier nominations, capping a career of more than fifty years that stretched from early sound pictures to studio-era classics to late-career musicals.