Michael Gordon

Biography

Michael Gordon (born Irving Kunin Gordon; Baltimore, 1909 – Los Angeles, 1993) was an American director whose career ran from the early 1940s into the early 1970s. Born to Jewish parents in Baltimore, he graduated from Yale and began in Hollywood as a dialogue director and editor before taking over direction himself in 1942. His career divides into two phases, separated by the blacklisting of the McCarthy era.

In the 1940s he made low-budget B-movies, then turned to melodramas, action pictures and film noir. His most celebrated work from that period is Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), which won José Ferrer the Academy Award for Best Actor. After two films in 1951, his past links to left-wing organisations kept him out of work for most of the decade. He returned with Pillow Talk (1959), a comedy starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and from then on concentrated mainly on light comedies, with the noir-tinged Portrait in Black as a notable exception. He stepped away from directing in the early 1970s. He was also a stage director and a member of the Group Theatre in the 1930s.

His grandson is the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Key films

• The Web (1947): a psychological thriller about a war veteran accused of murder.
• Cyrano de Bergerac (1950): an adaptation of Rostand's play that earned Ferrer his Oscar.
• Pillow Talk (1959): a romantic comedy that revived his career after the blacklist.
• Portrait in Black (1960): a drama with Lana Turner, one of his few departures from comedy in his later phase.
• Move Over, Darling (1963): a comedy with Doris Day and James Garner.
• Texas Across the River (1966): a Western with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop.