Stanley Donen

Stanley Donen was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1924 and co-directed Singin' in the Rain (1952) with Gene Kelly at the age of twenty-seven, a film now widely regarded as the finest example of the Hollywood musical. He spent much of the rest of his career demonstrating that his gifts extended well beyond the musical form, moving into stylish, cosmopolitan comedies and thrillers through the 1950s and 1960s. Donen directed Grant in four films, more than any director besides Alfred Hitchcock: the naval comedy Kiss Them for Me (1957); Indiscreet (1958), opposite Ingrid Bergman; The Grass Is Greener (1960), opposite Deborah Kerr; and Charade (1963), opposite Audrey Hepburn. Charade, made when Grant was fifty-nine, is often cited as the finest performance of his late career; Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone built the film explicitly around Grant's own reluctance to play a conventional romance with a much younger co-star, writing his discomfort with the age gap directly into the dialogue rather than concealing it. Donen's other landmark work includes On the Town (1949), also co-directed with Kelly, Funny Face (1957) with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, and Two for the Road (1967), a nonlinear marriage drama that marked a further departure from musical comedy into something cooler and more melancholic. He received an Honorary Academy Award in 1998, having never won a competitive Oscar for directing, and died in New York in 2019. Charade remains so tonally close to a Hitchcock thriller that it is routinely described as the best film Hitchcock never made.