Veteran film writer McBride clearly esteems Cukor’s “rich, multifaceted, deeply personal” worldview as expressed in his oeuvre. He ascribes Cukor’s masterful conveyance of nuance in human behavior, of subtext, to the director’s own “double life”—Cukor’s outsider status as a “partially closeted” gay man, a son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. McBride appraises Cukor’s craft throughout his long career of working intimately with actors in dozens of films, finding themes and throughlines. Cukor elicited such landmark star turns as Greta Garbo in Camille (1936), Joan Crawford and others in The Women (1939), Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born (1954), and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib (1949), the “high tide of American sophisticated comedy.” Indelible performances by Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) reflect the “seamless match of this Pygmalion-like director with his material” in what McBride characterizes as Cukor’s most personal film and the only film to win Cukor an Academy Award as Best Director. A career-long fascination with sexual unconventionality and gender fluidity culminated in Cukor’s “late journey of self-revelation” and such camp turns as Maggie Smith in Travels With My Aunt (1972). Trained in theater, Cukor saw all “human interaction, and romance in particular, as a form of performance.” Appropriate to the director’s body of work, McBride examines Cukor’s professional excellence by foregrounding the classic performances he was able to draw out from his famous actors. Although Cukor was “reductively stereotyped as a ‘woman’s director’” (code for gay), McBride offers strong evidence that he was in fact “one of the finest actors’ directors.”
