Arthur Freed

Arthur Freed, born Arthur Grossman on September 9, 1894, in Charleston, South Carolina, was an American lyricist and Hollywood film producer. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he wrote poetry, and graduated in 1914. He then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a song-plugger and pianist. An early connection with Minnie Marx led him to perform as a singer with her sons' act, the Marx Brothers, on the vaudeville circuit, and he also contributed material to their performances.

Freed transitioned into songwriting and was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he spent years writing lyrics for numerous films, frequently collaborating with composer Nacio Herb Brown. In 1939, he served in an uncredited associate producer capacity on The Wizard of Oz, after which MGM promoted him to head his own production unit within the studio. His first solo producing credit came that same year with Babes in Arms, the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The film's success initiated a series of similarly structured musicals featuring the same two stars.

As a producer, Freed recruited extensively from Broadway, bringing directors, writers, choreographers, and performers to MGM's soundstages. Among those he brought to the studio were Vincente Minnelli, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Roger Edens, Kay Thompson, Zero Mostel, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, and Charles Walters, along with orchestrators Conrad Salinger, Johnny Green, and Lennie Hayton. He also played a role in shaping the careers of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Lena Horne, Jane Powell, Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller, and Vera-Ellen, among others. He recruited Fred Astaire to MGM following Astaire's tenure at RKO, persuading him out of semi-retirement to appear alongside Judy Garland in Easter Parade.

Freed produced the film Singin' in the Rain, the soundtrack of which drew primarily from songs he had co-written earlier in his career. He also had a significant hand in MGM's 1951 Technicolor adaptation of Show Boat, the stage musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. According to Hugh Fordin's book The World of Entertainment, Freed took issue with the structure of the show's second act, in which more than twenty years elapse before the final scenes. Working with screenwriter John Lee Mahin, he restructured the narrative so that the gambler Gaylord Ravenal departs while his wife Magnolia is still young and pregnant, and arranged for the character Julie to be the figure who reunites the couple after a shorter separation. Freed also cast Ava Gardner in the role of Julie.

Two of Freed's productions won the Academy Award for Best Picture: An American in Paris in 1951 and Gigi in 1958, both directed by Vincente Minnelli. On the evening An American in Paris received the Best Picture award, Freed also accepted an Honorary Oscar. The 1951 ceremony was the first in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated producers by name rather than by studio, and because Freed was the sole nominee for An American in Paris, he became the first individual to win the award by name rather than on behalf of a studio. That same year, his version of Show Boat received two Oscar nominations. Freed had allowed his directors and choreographers considerable creative latitude, which was unusual for the era of committee-driven film production. This approach enabled decisions such as the inclusion of a fifteen-minute ballet sequence near the conclusion of An American in Paris and granting the songwriting team of Lerner and Loewe full creative control over Gigi. Singin' in the Rain, now widely regarded as his most celebrated film, received no Academy Awards.

Freed departed MGM in 1961 and subsequently served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences until 1966. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1973.

In her 1988 autobiography, actress Shirley Temple wrote that when she was twelve years old, Freed, then forty-six, exposed himself to her during a meeting at which he was considering her for MGM. She repeated this account during an October 25, 1988, appearance on Larry King Live, adding that Louis B. Mayer had simultaneously made sexual advances toward her mother in an adjacent room. Temple stated that these incidents were among the reasons she left MGM after a single film and returned to Fox. In 2017, actress and dancer Barrie Chase recounted experiencing inappropriate conduct by Freed during the mid-1950s.