Mervyn LeRoy
LeRoy in 1958
Born	(1900-10-15)October 15, 1900 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died	September 13, 1987(1987-09-13) (aged 86) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale)
Occupations	Film director producer
Years active	1928–1968
Employer(s)	First National Pictures (1927–1929) Warner Bros. (1929–1938) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1938–1945) (1948–1954) Warner Bros. (1955–1959)[1]
Spouses	Edna Murphy ​ ​ (m. 1927; div. 1932)​ Doris Warner ​ ​ (m. 1934; div. 1942)​ Katherine Spiegel ​ (m. 1946)​
Children	2, including Warner

Mervyn LeRoy (/ləˈrɔɪ/; October 15, 1900 – September 13, 1987) was an American film director and producer. In his youth he played juvenile roles in vaudeville and silent film comedies.^[2]

During the 1930s, LeRoy was one of the two great practitioners of economical and effective film directing at Warner Brothers studios, the other his cohort Michael Curtiz. LeRoy's most acclaimed films of his tenure at Warners include Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and They Won't Forget (1937).^[3][4]

LeRoy left Warners and moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in 1939 to serve as both director and producer. Perhaps his most notable achievement as a producer is the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz.^[5]

Early life

LeRoy was born on October 15, 1900, in San Francisco, California, the only child of Edna (née Armer) and Harry LeRoy, a well-to-do department store owner. Both his parents' families had fully assimilated, residing in the Bay Area for several generations. LeRoy described his relatives as "San Franciscans first, Americans second, Jews third."^[6][7][8]

LeRoy's mother was a frequent attendee at San Francisco's premier vaudeville venues, the Orpheum and the Alcazar, often socializing with the theater's personnel. She arranged for the six-year-old LeRoy to serve as a Native-American papoose in the 1906 stage production of The Squaw Man. LeRoy attributed his early interest in vaudeville to "my mother's fascination with it" and to that of his cousins, Jesse L. Lasky and Blanche Lasky, vaudevillians during LeRoy's youth.^[9]

LeRoy's parents separated suddenly in 1905 for reasons that were not divulged to their son. They never reunited and his father Harry raised LeRoy as a single parent. His mother moved to Oakland, California with Percy Teeple, a travel agent and former journalist, who would later become LeRoy's stepfather after the death of Harry Leroy in 1916. LeRoy visited his mother as a child, regarding her more as "a grandparent or a favorite aunt."^[10][11][12]

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire devastated the city when LeRoy was five-and-a-half years old. He was sleeping in his bed on the second floor when the quake struck in the early morning causing the house to collapse. Neither LeRoy nor his father suffered serious physical injury. His father's import-export store was completely destroyed. LeRoy retained vivid mental images of the city's devastation:

Aerial view of the aftermath to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire

My memory is a kaleidoscope of pictures. I have always thought in visual terms and when I recall that morning of April 18, 1906, I see a mental album of tragic pictures...many years later in Quo Vadis, I shot the burning of Rome and I drew on my memories of the burning of San Francisco as a grim model.^[14][15]

Reduced to virtual penury, father and son lived as displaced persons at the military-run tent city on the Presidio for the next six months. The elder LeRoy obtained work as a salesman for the Heinz Pickle Company, but his business losses had left him "a beaten man." The young LeRoy emerged from the traumatic event with a sense of pride that he had survived the ordeal and to regard it as fortuitous: "The big thing in my life was the earthquake...it changed my life before I knew I even had one."^[16]

At the age of twelve, with few prospects to acquire a formal education and his father financially strained, LeRoy became a newsboy and earned his first money. His father supported him in this endeavor.^[17] LeRoy hawked newspapers at iconic locations, including Chinatown, the Barbary Coast red-light district and Fisherman's Wharf, where he became educated as to the realities of life in the city:

I saw life in raw on the streets of San Francisco. I met the cops and the whores and the reporters and the bartenders and the Chinese and the [commercial] fishermen and shopkeepers. I knew them all, knew how they thought and how they loved and how they hated. When it came time for me to make motion pictures, I made movies that were real, because I knew how real people behaved.^[18]

Juvenile acts in vaudeville: 1914–1923

Selling newspapers near the Alcazar Theatre, LeRoy was spotted by stage star Theodore Roberts. A personable and attractive youth at age fourteen, LeRoy was engaged for a bit part in a 1914 stage production of Barbara Frietchie. Gratified by "that lovely feeling—audience approval", he performed in productions with the Liberty Theater in Oakland, playing the lead juvenile roles in Tom Sawyer and Little Lord Fauntleroy.^[19][20]

Early Hollywood career: technician and actor: 1919–1923

LeRoy accepted a bit role in a scene with former The Perils of Pauline (1914) star Pearl White filmed at Fort Lee, New Jersey. LeRoy was "thoroughly intrigued" by the filmmaking process, recalling "I knew I was finished with vaudeville. I knew, just as positively that I wanted to get into the movie business."^[28][29]

In October 1919 LeRoy, just turned 19, approached his cousin Jesse L. Lasky, a former vaudevillian who was twenty years his senior. Lasky was a partner with rising movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Adolf Zukor at its New York headquarters at Famous Players–Lasky. Lasky furnished LeRoy with note to the employment department at their Hollywood studios. A week later LeRoy began working in the Wardrobe Unit folding costumes for the American Civil War picture Secret Service (1919), earning $12.50 a week.^[30][31]

According to film historian Kingley Canham, Leroy's "enthusiasm, energy and push", in addition to a further appeal to Jesse Lasky, earned LeRoy promotion to lab technician in the film tinting unit.^[32][33]

LeRoy's next advancement was achieved through his own initiative.^[34] Discovering that director William DeMille wished to create an illusion of moonlight shimmering on a lake to produce a romantic effect, LeRoy devised a technique in the lab:

I had an idea. That night I stayed late in the lab...I got a big wooden box about twelve feet square and lined it with tar paper. Then I filled it with distilled water...I got a spotlight and carefully set it up so the light played upon the surface of the water...I took one of the studio's Pathé cameras, found a supply of raw film and shot some five-thousand feet of my pseudo-moonlight-on-the-water.^[35]

Despite LeRoy suffering a stern reprimand, DeMille was delighted with the effect and used the footage in the film. LeRoy was immediately promoted to assistant cameraman.^[36][37]

After six months behind the camera, LeRoy experienced a disastrous contretemps when he improperly adjusted the camera focus settings, ruining footage on several scenes on a DeMille production. LeRoy describes it as "a horrible mess" which led to his dismissal in 1921 as cameraman.^[38][39]

LeRoy was soon hired as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic The Ten Commandments^[40] LeRoy credits Cecil B. DeMille, for inspiring him to become a director: "As the top director of the era, DeMille had been the magnet that had drawn me to his set as often as I could go."^[41][42] LeRoy also credits DeMille for teaching him the directing techniques required to make his own films.^[42]

LeRoy worked intermittently in small supporting roles in film during the early 1920s. The youthful and diminutive LeRoy (at 5 feet 7 inches [170 cm] and just over 115 pounds [52 kg]) was consistently cast in juvenile roles.^[43][44] appearing with film stars Wallace Reid, Betty Compson and Gloria Swanson (See Film Chronology table) He performed his last role in The Chorus Lady (1924) as "Duke".^[45][46]

First National Pictures: transition to sound, 1927–1930

On the set of Oh, Kay! (1928), publicity still. L to R, LeRoy, Colleen Moore

His success with No Place to Go (1927), was followed by "a string of comedies and jazz-baby dramas" that served as vehicles for actress Alice White and allowed LeRoy to hone his skills as director. His prolific output in the final years of the silent film era included the box-office successes Harold Teen with Arthur Lake and Oh, Kay! with Colleen Moore.^[51][52][53]

Warner Brothers acquired First National in 1925 as a subsidiary studio and producer Jack Warner became a mentor and in-law to LeRoy in subsequent years.^[54][55]

LeRoy eagerly anticipated his first sound picture assignment, Naughty Baby (1929):

My fifth picture, in 1929, was my first with sound. I had been watching the experiments with talkies with tremendous excitement...As a veteran of stage and vaudeville, I knew the value of the spoken and sung word. I understood dialogue, because I had been an actor...I couldn't wait until I had a change to direct a talking picture.^[56]

LeRoy's early directing efforts at First National were largely limited to comedies. His movies from this period include Gentleman's Fate (1931) with John Gilbert (filmed at M-G-M studios), Tonight or Never (1931), with Gloria Swanson, High Pressure, a proto-screwball comedy with William Powell and Evelyn Brent, and The Heart of New York (1932) with Joe Smith.

Warner Brothers: 1930–1939

LeRoy embarked on a period of enormous productivity and inventiveness at Warner Studios, creating "some the most polished and ambitious" films of the Thirties. His only rival at Warner's was fellow director Michael Curtiz. Film historian John Baxter observes:

Warners films were the most perfectly economical exercises in cinematic mechanics of which Hollywood was capable. There was no fat on them, either as art or entertainment...as a filmmaking tool, it functioned best in the hands of two great directors, Mervyn Leroy and Michael Curtiz.^[57]

In the studio's competitive crucible produced by the Great Depression demanding profitable entertainment, LeRoy directed 36 pictures during the decade (Curtiz filmed an astounding 44 features during the same period). Baxter adds: "No genius could function without variation under such pressure."^[58][59] The social perspective of films favored at Warner Brothers was distinct from those of its chief rivals: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), uncontested for its "technical virtuosity" aimed to serve "middle-class tastes" and Paramount studios identified for its "sophisticated dialogue and baroque settings" that catered to European sensibilities.^[60] In contrast, Warner Brothers films carried themes appealing to the working classes.^[61] Leroy biographer Kingsley Canham writes:

The topicality of Warner's material and its direct appeal to the working classes set it apart from other studios. What their film lacked in gloss in comparison to M-G-M or the sophistication of Paramount was more than adequately compensated for by their presentation of everyday material...the working classes could identify with people, the situations and surroundings...^[62]

LeRoy's output in the early thirties was prodigious. The director attests to the rate of film production at the studios:

...While the world was struggling out of the depression, I turned out film after film after film. It was a period of tremendous activity for me—and for Hollywood in general...I threw myself into my work...we had to keep working to stay up with the demand. The public was voracious in its appetite for movies...Neighborhood theaters had double features, and the bill usually changed twice a week. That means they were showing four new pictures a week, 208 a year, and that's only one theater.^[64]

LeRoy admits in retrospect that "I shot them so often and so fast that they tend to blend together in my memory."^[64][65]

LeRoy's social realism mocked corrupt politicians, bankers and the idle rich, while celebrating the Depression Era experiences of "hard-working chorus girls...taxi-drivers and bell-hops struggling to make ends meet in the brawl of New York...gloss and polish were considered useless affectation."^[66][67]

Producer-Director at Warner Brothers: 1936–1938

In 1936, Warners began tasking LeRoy with both directing and producing assignments. LeRoy served as producer-director on Three Men on a Horse (1936), a "madcap" comedy starring Frank McHugh and a screenplay co-written by Groucho Marx. This was followed in 1937 with The King and the Chorus Girl, starring French actor Fernand Gravet . Both films costarred Joan Blondell.^{[111][112][113]}

Leroy also produced director James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937), a historical comedy with Brian Aherne who plays the renowned English actor.^[114]

Interlude as producer: M-G-M: 1938–1939

LeRoy arrived at M-G-M fully expecting to finish his career as the studio's chief production executive.^[121] His first assignments were modest:^[122]

Dramatic School (1938) directed by Robert B. Sinclair: A romantic drama starring Luise Rainer and Paulette Goddard and LeRoy's first picture at M-G-M. Biographer John Baxter attributes Rainer's "coherent, moving and truthful" performance to producer LeRoy and "a fitting to [the filmmakers] rich Thirties career."^[123][124]

Stand Up and Fight (1938), directed by W. S. Van Dyke: A Wallace Beery vehicle, with costars Robert Taylor and Florence Rice. The screenplay was co-written by crime fiction writer James M. Cain, and Jane Murfin, who wrote the adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel the Katharine Hepburn vehicle Alice Adams (1935).^[125]

At the Circus (1938) directed by Edward Buzzell: A Marx Brothers comedy.^[126]

Leroy's last picture as M-G-M's production executive was an adaptation of L. Frank Baum's children's book The Wizard of Oz.^[127]

Director at M-G-M: 1940–1949

The onset of war in Europe in 1939 created anxiety in the Hollywood film industry as the overseas movie market contracted and currency restrictions mounted in Great Britain. Hollywood studios implemented salary reductions and limits on film content were imposed, particularly at M-G-M. Film historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg describe these developments persisting "almost to the end of the decade":

At Metro, the idea was to concentrate on nice people involved in heartbreak, finding their happiness at last in each others arms, and all in settings of an idealized and antiseptic beauty: an England full of sunshine and chintz and doves, an America full of white fences and rambler roses around the door. Hagiographies of inventors and reformers glowed with optimistic charm…^[135]

Critic Andrew Sarris disparages the "sentimental piety and conformist cant" that characterized M-G-M studios, as well as Warner Brothers in Hollywood's Golden Age^[136]

LeRoy limited himself to directing features at M-G-M for the next 9 years, delivering 11 pictures. The quality of his output during this period is generally viewed as a decline creatively compared to his early work at Warner Brothers during the Thirties.^[137][138]

He resumed directorial duties with an adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's romantic play Waterloo Bridge (1930).^[139][140]

Postwar Hollywood in the 1940s

The Hollywood film industry reached its zenith in productivity, profitability, and popularity at the end of World War II. The studios collectively enjoyed their most lucrative year in 1946, with gross earnings reaching 1.75 billion dollars.^[184] In the closing years of the decade, organized labor won wage increases of 25% through protracted strikes. Overseas markets imposed substantial taxes on Hollywood films. Studios reacted by cutting expenses on film production and ordering mass layoffs.^[185] Historians Higham and Greenberg describe the qualitative impact on Hollywood films:

Sudden economy waves threw thousands out of work. Budgets were cut, crowd scenes minimized, epics involving large and expensive sets abandoned in favor of stories emphasizing 'story' and 'realism' rather than lavish production values...efficiency was the keynote everywhere...^[186]

The formerly "glossy" productions were often replaced with lower budget black-and-white films, employing smaller casts and using indoor stages, rather than expensive on location sites.^[186]

Compounding the financial crisis was the Red Scare launched against purported Communist influence in Hollywood.^[187] The leading studio executives expelled many of the most talented figures in collaboration with House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Accused of introducing Communist content into productions, the departure of Leftist screenwriters, directors and actors removed a creative element that had for years contributed to the high calibre and profitability of Hollywood pictures. These purgings were considered, in some financial circles and the anti-Communist establishment, a necessary corrective to labor militancy in the industry: "To some observers, [the blacklist] represented a long overdue housecleaning process; to others it meant the beginning of an era of fear, betrayal and witch-hunting hysteria."^[188]

Leroy reflected on the Red Scare in his 1974 memoir:

I am strongly pro-American and I had come to recognize that some Communist propaganda was creeping into movies. I felt it was a good thing to root that out, but I deplored that excesses that went into the rooting-out process...there were writers who were supposedly on the Hollywood blacklist that I trusted...I had used Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, as writer on Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo in 1945. He turned out a great American story for me, and it had not the slightest hint of anything subversive in it....[The Red Scare] was a sorry period for human relations. Out of fear and self-preservation, men and women informed on their friends, even on their husbands or wives.^[189]

By the close of the Forties, the drain of artistic talent, the emerging television industry, and litigation that led to the weakening of studio monopolies destabilized the film industry, initiating a decline in the heretofore unlimited power and profitability of the Hollywood movie empire.^[190][191]

Quo Vadis (1951): Biblical spectacle

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Quo Vadis (1950) dramatizes an episode in the apocrypha Acts of Peter. The Latin title translates as "Where are you going?", adapted from a novel by Nobel Laureate author Henryk Sienkiewicz.^[203]

LeRoy's recognized that the Hollywood film industry would be best served by "accommodating" the emerging popularity of television, envisioning a division of mass entertainment function: TV would do small scale, low-budget productions dealing with "intimate things", while the motion picture studios would provide "the bigger, broader type of film."^[204] LeRoy's turn to "gigantic spectacle" coincided with the early onset of Hollywood's relative decline, as described by film historians Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg:

At the close of the Forties, something vital seemed to be ebbing away ever more swiftly from the films of Hollywood, a process accelerating in the early Fifties, reaching a climax with the introduction of CinemaScope...the Forties may now be seen as the apotheosis of the U.S. feature film, its last great show of confidence and skill before it succumbed artistically to the paralyzing effects of bigger and bigger screens and the collapse of the star system.^[205]

Logistically, Quo Vadis presented an "enormity." Filmed at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome, the production required the mobilization of tens-of thousands of extras, over nine months of shooting and an immense financial risk for M-G-M.^[207][208]

The huge investment in time and money paid off: Second only to Gone with the Wind (1939) in gross earnings, Quo Vadis garnered eight Academy Award nominations in 1952.^[209]

Leroy welcomed the services of an American Jesuit priest assigned to act as a technical advisor on the production. The director was granted a personal audience with Pope Pius XII and upon LeRoy's request, the Pope blessed the script of Quo Vadis.^[210]

Warner Brothers redux: 1955–1959

After completing his last production featuring Greer Garson in Strange Lady in Town (1955), LeRoy turned largely to adapting Broadway successes, serving as producer and director and often enlisting casts from the original stage productions.^[222][223]

Return to director-producer

LeRoy assumed the dual role of director-producer in the late Fifties and Sixties- the declining period of the Hollywood Golden Age, primarily serving at Warner Studios, but also 20th Century Fox, Columbia and Universal.^[205][230] Critic Kingsley Canham offers the following appraisal of LeRoy's work in this period:

Leroy's work in the later half of the Fifties and Sixties has been largely confined to adaptations of stage successes, interspersed with the odd drama such as The FBI Story (1959), The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and Moment to Moment (1966). Many of the former displayed an unhappy tendency toward excessive length or they padded out a basically funny situation beyond its endurance (e.g. A Majority of One [1961] and Wake Me When it's Over [1960]), tending to make one feel that LeRoy was better off in the Thirties when he had to work in the more restricted confines of the old Hollywood system when it was at its peak...whereas [the] Fifties signaled the death knell of the Old Hollywood, leaving directors like LeRoy to struggle with unsuitable material, assigned to them by virtue of their past reputations.^[231]

Despite these developments, LeRoy remained a profitable asset in the film industry.

The Bad Seed (1956): The film is based on a story by William March about a disturbed eleven-year-old girl whose murderous behavior is credited to her genetic heritage: she is the granddaughter of a notorious serial killer. Maxwell Anderson's 1954 stage production enjoyed success and Leroy imported most of the cast for his film adaptation, including child actor Patty McCormick. The Motion Picture Production Code required that the child murderess perish for her crimes, and LeRoy dispatches her with a lightning bolt. Leroy recounts his struggle with censors:

I couldn't budge the Johnston Office people...In those days, long before the rating system, there was no halfway about it...You either got a seal of approval or you didn't, and Jack Warner wasn't about to release the film without that seal. So we had to change the ending. John Lee Mahin dreamed up the idea of having the child killed by a bolt of lightning. The Johnson Office gave us their blessing when we showed them the revised script.^[232]

The highly profitable Bad Seed garnered Academy Award nominations for several of the principal cast and cinematographer Harold Rosson.^[233]

Toward the Unknown (1956): A sympathetic dramatization post-Korean War of a former Korean war POW William Holden, who struggles to recover from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and return to service as a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force.^[234]

No Time for Sergeants (1958): Novelist Mac Hyman's hillbilly protagonist Will Stockdale gained popularity in comic book form and was adapted to the stage by Ira Levin. Andy Griffith played the lead and Nick Adams his sidekick in LeRoy's film adaptation.^[235][236]

Home Before Dark (1958): Based on a story and screenplay by Robert and Eileen Bassing, LeRoy examines the struggle of a former mental patient (Jean Simmons) to normalize her relationships with her husband (Dan O'Herlihy) who she suspects of having an affair with her half-sister (Rhonda Fleming).^[237][238]

The FBI Story (1959): A hagiographic review of federal law enforcement figure Chip Hardesty, vetted by the LeRoy's close personal friend and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and starring James Stewart.^{[239][240][241]} For his services in directing and producing The FBI Story, the agency honored LeRoy with its Distinguished Service Award.^[242][243]

Wake Me When It's Over (1960), 20th Century Fox: A comedy-of-errors involving the appropriation of post-WWII era army surplus to build a resort on a remote Japanese island occupied by US troops. Starring Ernie Kovacs and Dick Shawn.^[244][245]

The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961), Columbia Pictures: A priest (Spencer Tracy) and a convict (Frank Sinatra) join forces to rescue children from a leper colony when a volcano eruption threatens their Polynesian island.^{[246][247][248]}

A Majority of One (1961): Warner Brothers: An adaptation of the successful Leonard Spigelgass play directed by Dore Schary. Stage actors Gertrude Berg and Cedric Hardwicke were replaced by producer Jack L. Warner with film stars Rosalind Russell and Alec Guinness as the romantic leads, set in Japan.^[249][250]

Gypsy (1962), Warner Brothers: LeRoy returned to musicals with a portrayal of the young Gypsy Rose Lee in her early career as a burlesque stripper, played by Natalie Wood and Rosalind Russell as her domineering stage mother.^{[251][252][253]}

Moment to Moment (1965), Universal: LeRoy's last credited directorial effort, Moment to Moment starring Jean Seberg and Honor Blackman.^[254][255]

Following Moment to Moment, disputes with Universal production head Edward Muhl over studio-proposed screenplays led to Leroy's return to Warner Brothers under Jack Warner's auspices. There he embarked on several projects, including preproduction for an adaptation of James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, a tale that Leroy believed "had the makings of another Wizard of Oz." When Warners was purchased by The McKinney Company, executives cancelled the project and Leroy quit the studio.^[256]

Casting discoveries

LeRoy has been credited with launching or advancing the careers of numerous actors in Hollywood films when he served as director or producer at Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Biographer Kingsley Canham makes these observations:

LeRoy's undoubted talent as a producer and a star-maker, and his knack for recognizing potential [in actors], made him an outstanding success, both critically and financially… ...in the competitive and highly-charged atmosphere [in the old Hollywood system], LeRoy spotted stars like Lana Turner, Jane Wyman, Loretta Young, Audrey Hepburn and the Dead End Kids...[and] was able to promote them in scripts that suited their personalities.^[262]

Loretta Young: LeRoy's discovery of Loretta Young (then Gretchen Young) presents at least two distinct origin tales: Ronald L. Bowers in Film Review [April 1969]) reported that Leroy had directly solicited the 13-year-old Young in 1926 to play a juvenile part in Naughty but Nice (1927), a Colleen Moore vehicle for which Young received $80.00.^[263]

LeRoy, in his memoir Take One, offers a variation of this origin story: In 1930, Leroy reports that he recruited Young through the auspices of her mother. Leroy needed a leading lady to play opposite Grant Withers in Too Young to Marry (1931). Young's older half-sister (stage name Sally Blane) was engaged on another film, and her mother offered the younger daughter, Gretchen, as a substitute. LeRoy agreed, but changed her name to Loretta.^[264]

Clark Gable: Warner Brothers studio cast Edward G. Robinson in the role of gangster Rico Bandello in Little Caesar (1930), but Leroy was anxious to cast the part of racketeer Joe Masara. Rejecting Warners offer of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., LeRoy spotted Gable in a touring production of The Last Mile at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles in the role of Killer Mears, and arranged a screen test with the stage actor. Pleased with the results, LeRoy championed Gable to producers Darryl Zanuck and Jack L. Warner for the part: they emphatically rejected the prospect, objecting to his relatively large ears. LeRoy declined the opportunity to sign Gable in a personal contract, which he would later regret. Despite this, Gable credited LeRoy for elevating his prospects in Hollywood: "He always gave me credit for discovering him." As Leroy shared in an interview with John Gillett in 1970: "I always tried to help young players- Clark Gable would have been in Little Caesar, but the front office thought his ears were too big."^{[265][266][267]}

Jane Wyman: LeRoy claims Wyman as one of his discoveries, though she had already been signed by Jack L. Warner at the age of 16, though not yet cast in a production. She was selected by LeRoy to play a bit part in his 1933 Elmer, the Great. LeRoy recalled his first encounter with the actress:

...I found [Wyman] on the [Warners] lot. Although Jack Warner had signed her, he hadn't used her in anything. I saw her walking around the lot one day in a yellow polo coat—I decided she'd be right for Elmer and put her in it. She did a beautiful job, and her career was launched.^[268][269]

Lana Turner: At age fifteen, the then Judy Turner was auditioned by LeRoy in his effort to cast an actor to play Mary Clay in the 1937 social drama They Won't Forget. According to LeRoy's recollections, Turner was introduced to him as a prospect by Warner Brothers casting director Solly Baianno.^[270] LeRoy changed her name to Lana (pronounced LAW-nuh) Turner and personally groomed Turner for stardom. Leroy would also direct Turner in his 1948 Homecoming co-starring Clark Gable.^[271][272]

Audrey Hepburn: During casting for M-G-M's 1950 biblical epic Quo Vadis LeRoy sought an unknown actress for the role of Lygia, the young Christian loved by centurion Marcus Vinicius, played by (Robert Taylor). Audrey Hepburn was among hundreds of aspirants who were tested for the part. LeRoy reports in his memoir that he personally championed Hepburn as a "sensational" pick for the role, but the studio declined.^[273][274]

Robert Mitchum: LeRoy singled out 27-year-old Mitchum among the extras during the shooting of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), casting him to play one of the crew of the "Ruptured Duck", a B-25 bomber. This was Mitchum's first role on screen, but M-G-M declined to sign him, despite LeRoy's urging. Mitchum starred with Greer Garson in Desire Me (1947), for which LeRoy's directorial contribution went uncredited.^[275]

Sophia Loren: According to LeRoy, actress Sophia Loren credits him with launching her film career. LeRoy had noticed the 16-year-old Loren among the extras assembled for a crowd scene in Quo Vadis, placing her in a prominent position where his cameras would "pick up this tall, Italian dark-eyed beauty." Years later, Loren personally thanked him: "My Mother and I needed the money and you hired us. None of [my film career] would have happened except for you."^[276]

Personal life

LeRoy married three times and had many relationships with Hollywood actresses. He was first married to Edna Murphy in 1927, which ended in divorce in 1932. During their separation, LeRoy dated Ginger Rogers, but they ended the relationship and stayed lifelong friends. In 1934, he married Doris Warner, the daughter of Warner Bros. founder, Harry Warner. The couple had one son, Warner LeRoy and one daughter, Linda LeRoy Janklow, who is married to Morton L. Janklow.^[277] His son, Warner LeRoy, became a restaurateur. The marriage ended in divorce in 1942. In 1946, he married Kathryn "Kitty" Prest Rend, who had been previously married to Sidney M. Spiegel (the co-founder of Essaness Theatres and grandson of Joseph Spiegel); and to restaurateur Ernie Byfield.^[278][279] They remained married until his death. LeRoy also sold his Bel Air, Los Angeles, home to Johnny Carson.^[280][281]

Death

After being bedridden for six months, LeRoy died of heart issues complicated by Alzheimer's disease in Beverly Hills, California on September 13, 1987, at the age of 86. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.^[284][285]

Film chronology

^[286]

Footnotes

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mervyn LeRoy.

• Mervyn LeRoy at IMDb
• Mervyn LeRoy at the TCM Movie Database
• Mervyn leRoy at Virtual History