He is one of the most underestimated Hollywood’s directors, a great orchestrater of complicated scenes and films made much more simple than their screenplays, a tenacious perfectionist, maybe he was the dramatic and epic cinema’s Hitchcock. George was born in Oakland, California, in 1904, from two theatre actors: Georgie Cooper e Landers Stevens. When he was 18 years old he moved with them and his brother in California, his parents stopped acting and he decided to start the cinematographic career. During the Twenties he contributed to many comedies of the Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy duo and in 1934 he debuted as a director, after many short film, with Hollywood Party, always with the Laurel & Hardy couple.
Actually many other great and unaccredited directors gave a contribution to the film, from Sam Wood and Edmund Goulding to Allan Dawn. The first movie as the only director was made the same year: the sentimental comedy Bachelor Bait for RKO. In 1935 he started a series of very successful movies such as Alice Adams with Katherine Hepburn, Swing Time with the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers couple and A Damsel in Distress again with Astaire. Between the Thirties and the Forties he also directed the famous Gunga Din, a war and adventure movie with Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen, and the fabulous comedy of 1942, Woman of the Year, with Spencer Tracy e Katherine Hepburn. The Fifties started with A Place in the Sun, his masterpiece, Shane in 1953 and Giant in 1955 (for which he won the Oscar). He certainly is great in directing actors like Montgomery Clift, Allan Ladd, James Dean and Rock Hudson. In 1959 he directed the really famous and touching The Diary of Anne Frank, about the girl who wrote a deep diary under the Nazi terrorism. Warren Beatty, who interpreted his last movie The Only Game in Town with Liz Taylor in 1970, has always considered him his master director. He died in 1975.
