Harold Hecht

Harold Adolphe Hecht was born on June 1, 1907, in Yorkville, New York City, to Joseph and Rose Hecht. His father, born in Austria, had immigrated to New York City in January 1899 after working as a sailor and later established himself as a building contractor. His mother was also born in Austria, and the couple married in 1906 and had two children: Harold and Janet Hecht, born in 1910, who later became Janet Garfield and was the mother of film trailer producer Warren Garfield. Hecht attended PS 169, from which he graduated in the spring of 1923 at the age of sixteen.

Hecht's formal training began in late 1923 when he was among the first students accepted to the American Laboratory Theatre, opened that November by Richard Boleslavsky, a Russian immigrant and former student of Konstantin Stanislavsky. The school was the first in the United States to teach Stanislavski's system of acting. Among his fellow students were Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Anne Revere, Lenore Romney, and Francis Fergusson. Hecht excelled at the school and was accepted into its Auxiliary Acting Group, which allowed him to appear in the school's produced plays while continuing under Boleslavsky's instruction beyond the standard two-year curriculum.

His Broadway career spanned 1926 to 1928 and grew directly out of his time at the American Laboratory Theatre. During this period he appeared in The Straw Hat in October and November of 1926, Big Lake in April 1927, Much Ado About Everything in November and December of 1927, Dr. Knock in February and March of 1928, the revue Grand Street Follies in 1928 with dances staged by James Cagney, and The Wild Duck beginning in November 1928. He also appeared in Sing for Your Supper. In addition to performing, Hecht was drawn to choreography through his work on the school's productions and served as a stage assistant to Boleslavsky on both school and outside Broadway productions.

After the American Laboratory Theatre closed in the spring of 1930, Hecht continued working on Broadway as a dancer and choreographer until late 1931, collaborating during that period with Mikhail Mordkin, Martha Graham, George White, and Albertina Rasch. He also worked on Les noces at the Metropolitan Opera.

In October 1931, Boleslavsky invited Hecht to Hollywood to choreograph dance numbers for a project at RKO Radio Pictures, marking the beginning of Hecht's first Hollywood career. During the early to mid-1930s he became one of the leading dance directors in the film industry, working alongside the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, and Marion Davies.

In 1947, Hecht co-founded Norma Productions, an independent film production company, with actor and business partner Burt Lancaster. The company's subsidiaries, Hecht-Lancaster Productions and later Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, operated from 1954 to 1959 and were among the most significant independent production units in Hollywood during that period. At the 28th Academy Awards ceremony in 1956, Hecht received the Best Picture Oscar for the 1955 film Marty. He received a second Academy Award nomination at the 31st ceremony for the 1958 film Separate Tables, and at that ceremony he accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress on behalf of Wendy Hiller, who was unable to attend. The Broadway production of Separate Tables, produced by Hecht-Lancaster Productions, received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play at the 11th Tony Awards ceremony in April 1957.

In November 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower selected Hecht to accompany a cultural exchange program committee on a trip to Russia after Marty was chosen by the USSR as the first American film to be screened in that country since World War II. Following the dissolution of the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster partnership, Hecht continued as an independent producer and was a member of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Producers Guild. Fourteen of his film productions, along with three additional films on which he served as choreographer, received recognition at ceremonies and festivals including the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others. Four films with which Hecht was associated have been selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry: Duck Soup in 1990, Sweet Smell of Success in 1993, Marty in 1994, and She Done Him Wrong in 1996. Harold Hecht died on May 26, 1985.