Biografie

In 1950, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, paid Kanin the then-record sum of $1,000,000 for the movie rights to Garson's Broadway comedy "Born Yesterday.".

Wrote a book about his friendship with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn ("Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir", 1971, Plume). Hepburn saw this as a deep betrayal, and didn't speak with Kanin for many years.

Kanin spent 5 1/2 years in the Army, after he was drafted. Because there were so few opportunities for directors, he turned to writing. One of his ideas for a film, for Ginger Rogers, eventually evolved into the play, "Born Yesterday".

There is a 2009 biography of the lives and careers of the Kanin family (Garson, wife Ruth Gordon, brother Michael Kanin and sister-in-law Fay Kanin): "A Family Affair - The Kanins in Hollywood and on Broadway", written by Josh Kanin (his nephew) and Wayne Lindholm.

His first wife, Ruth Gordon, was sixteen years his senior; his second wife, Marian Seldes, was sixteen years his junior.

So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion-picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise.

A movie star is a creation of the substance of which, like a painting or a statue or a symphony, does not age. People grow older but stars remain.

Great beauties are infrequently great actresses, simply because they do not need to be.

{on Katharine Hepburn] As the years go by she does not lose her old admirers, she goes on gaining new ones.

Amateurs hope. Professionals work.