Film director George Cukor was born on this day
American film director George Cukor was born on this day in 1899. He established himself as a leading director in Hollywood in the 1930s and continued making films through to the early 1980s.
Among his many notable films are A Bill of Divorcement (1932), which starred John Barrymore and a young Katharine Hepburn. He worked again with Hepburn on Little Women the following year, and went on to direct Romeo and Juliet, The Women, The Philadelphia Story, and A Star Is Born.
A difficult point in Cukor’s career came in 1939, when he was dismissed from Gone with the Wind. He had spent more than two years in pre-production and oversaw the casting of the principal roles, but was replaced shortly after filming began.
At the Academy Awards in 1964, Cukor won Best Director for his adaptation of the musical My Fair Lady. This was his first win after several previous nominations across his career.
Cukor was widely known within Hollywood circles to be gay, and he hosted social gatherings that were popular among members of the industry’s LGBTQ+ community.
He continued making films through the 1970s, with his final film being 1981’s Rich and Famous, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen. Over his career, he collaborated with many leading actors, including Jane Fonda, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Maggie Smith, Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, Michael York, Cyd Charisse, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, and Judy Holliday.
Cukor died in 1983 after suffering a heart attack. He was 83 years old.
Composer Gian Carlo Menotti was born in Cadegliano-Viconago on this day in 1911
Menotti was born in Italy and began his musical training there, his mother later sent him to America where he enrolled in the Philadelphia Curtis Institute of Music. Among his fellow students were Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber.
Menotti and Barber became a couple and often worked together. After they graduated they bought a house together in My Kisco, New York. They named their house Capricorn, and it was their artistic retreat for over 40 years. Barber is best known for his 1936 work Adagio for Strings, as well as many operas and classical music pieces.
Menotti wrote operas and ballets, symphonies and concertos. A prolific composer his works include the operas The Telephone, Amelia Goes to the Ball, The Island God and The Last Savage. Two of his works received the Pulitzer Prize, The Consul and The Saint of Bleeker Street.
In 1970 he ended his long relationship with Barber, as Barber battled depression and alcoholism. They remained friends until Barber’s death in 1981.
In 1958 Menotti established a festival in Spoleto, Italy that aimed to bring opera to the masses, a sister festival was created in the USA in 1974. Menotti came to Australia in 1986 where he set up the Melbourne Spoleto Festival. He withdrew after three years and retained the naming rights, the festival is now the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
In 1974 Menotti adopted 36-year-old figure skater Francis ‘Chip’ Phelan as his son, he had known Phelan since the 1960s. Phelan took on Menotti’s name.
The Telephone was first performed in 1947 in a double bill with another of Menotti’s works. Menotti passed away in 2007 aged 95.
This post was first published in 2021.
