Samuel Goldwyn

Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974), American motion-picture producer, born in Warsaw, Russia (now in Poland). When he arrived in the United States in 1896, his surname was changed to Goldfish. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1902. In 1913 he entered the film business, forming, with partners Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which released its first film, The Squaw Man, in 1914. Three years later he formed Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (with Edgar and Archibald Selwyn) and the following year adopted the company's name as his own. In 1922 Goldwyn, after quarreling with his partners, was forced out of the corporation, and when it later merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), he benefited only as a stockholder. In 1923 he formed his own company, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, and from that time was an independent producer, soon acquiring a reputation for making quality films. Goldwyn was among the first producers to hire noted authors (among them Robert Sherwood, Sinclair Lewis, and Lillian Hellman) to write screenplays. He also prided himself on the quality of the actors he employed. The actors he introduced who would become stars include Ronald Colman, Danny Kaye, Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Susan Hayward, Gary Cooper, and David Niven.

Among Goldwyn's most memorable films are All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Street Scene (1931), Arrowsmith (1931), Dodsworth (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), Pride of the Yankees (1942), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), Guys and Dolls (1955), and Porgy and Bess (1959). He also produced The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won an Academy Award for best picture. In 1946 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award and in 1957 the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.