---
name: "Gregory La Cava"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/gregory-la-cava"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "10 March 1892"
died: "1 March 1952"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "director"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T23:38:42.156897+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Gregory La Cava

Director. Born 10 March 1892 in Towanda, Pennsylvania, USA. Died 1 March 1952.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 10 March 1892, Towanda, Pennsylvania, USA
- **Died:** 1 March 1952
- **Academy Awards:** 2 Oscar nominations
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_La_Cava, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q269585, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0478441/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/74659

## Fi1m on Gregory La Cava

> Gregory La Cava made comedies by letting people talk over one another, often without a finished script, and it produced some of the quickest films of the 1930s. *Stage Door* is the one to see; the career around it is patchier than it deserved.

The dining-room scenes in *Stage Door* (1937) run six or seven conversations at once. William Hamilton cuts them so you catch the end of a joke at one end of the table while another is being set up at the other, and Robert De Grasse shoots the house deep, so there is nearly always a woman in the background about to interrupt. La Cava let his actresses improvise, and you can hear it. That was how he worked: often with no fixed script, dictating dialogue on the set or rewriting each day to fit whoever was in front of him, sometimes building scenes out of conversations he had overheard.

He came to it sideways. He started as a cartoonist and animator, ran Hearst's International Film Service in 1917 and 1918 and directed more than a hundred animated shorts before moving to two-reel comedies in the early 1920s and features from the middle of that decade, including *So's Your Old Man* (1926) with W.C. Fields. Sound suited him better than silence did. The 1930s brought *Gabriel Over the White House* (1933), a political fantasy nothing like his comedies, *She Married Her Boss* (1935) with Claudette Colbert, *My Man Godfrey* (1936) and then *Stage Door*. After the late 1930s the films thinned out badly, and he died in 1952.

What the method bought him was people who sound like people. *My Man Godfrey* is a screwball comedy that keeps noticing the Depression going on outside the frame. His films tend to put a woman at the centre and let her carry the moral weight, and he worked repeatedly with the same hands: Ginger Rogers three times, the producer Pandro S. Berman three times, Fields twice. We laughed through the first hour of *Stage Door* and were not ready for how much the second half hurt, and the reason is that hour: La Cava had spent it teaching us to like these women by letting them be unkind to each other, so when the talk stops, we notice.

What the method cost was somebody else's money. Rewriting daily and shooting without a finished script meant overruns and disorder, and *Stage Door* was one of the films that caused them. He did not apologise for it. Of the stars he was warned about, he said that "so-called temperament is just a higher form of intelligence," which is the sentence of a man who preferred difficult actors to tidy schedules. Start with *Stage Door*, then *My Man Godfrey*, and be aware that a director who needed the right actors around him made fewer good films than he should have once they were gone.

## Biography

Gregory La Cava was an American film director. Born in Towanda, Pennsylvania, he began his career as a cartoonist and animator before moving into live-action shorts in the early 1920s and directing features from 1924.

He is best known for his 1930s comedies, including *My Man Godfrey* (1936) and *Stage Door* (1937). Both films earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. La Cava worked across several major studios and directed more than twenty features during the sound era.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, britannica.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Stage Door* (1937), Fi1m 85, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/stage-door.md)

## Complete filmography (59)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *Living in a Big Way* (1947), Story, Screenplay, Director
- *Lady in a Jam* (1942), Director, Producer
- *Unfinished Business* (1941), Director, Producer
- *Primrose Path* (1940), Screenplay, Director, Producer
- *Fifth Avenue Girl* (1939), Producer, Director
- *Stage Door* (1937), Director — Fi1m 85, [page](https://film.one/film/stage-door.md)
- *My Man Godfrey* (1936), Director
- *She Married Her Boss* (1935), Director
- *Private Worlds* (1935), Director, Screenplay
- *What Every Woman Knows* (1934), Director, Producer
- *The Affairs of Cellini* (1934), Director
- *Gallant Lady* (1933), Director
- *Bed of Roses* (1933), Director, Dialogue
- *Gabriel Over the White House* (1933), Director
- *The Half-Naked Truth* (1932), Director, Screenplay
- *The Age of Consent* (1932), Director
- *Symphony of Six Million* (1932), Director
- *Smart Woman* (1931), Director
- *Laugh and Get Rich* (1931), Director, Screenplay
- *His First Command* (1929), Director
- *Big News* (1929), Director
- *Saturday's Children* (1929), Director
- *Half a Bride* (1928), Director
- *Feel My Pulse* (1928), Director
- *The Gay Defender* (1927), Director
- *Tell It to Sweeney* (1927), Director, Producer
- *Running Wild* (1927), Director, Story, Producer
- *Paradise for Two* (1927), Director
- *So's Your Old Man* (1926), Director
- *Say It Again* (1926), Director
- *Let's Get Married* (1926), Director
- *Womanhandled* (1925), Director
- *The New School Teacher* (1924), Director
- *Restless Wives* (1924), Director
- *The Pill Pounder* (1923), Director
- *The Four Orphans* (1923), Director
- *A Social Error* (1922), Director
- *His Nibs* (1921), Director
- *One Good Turn Deserves Another* (1920), Director
- *Smokey Smokes* (1920), Director
- *Kats Is Kats* (1920), Director
- *The Breath of a Nation* (1919), Director
- *Knocking the 'H' Out of Heinie* (1919), Director
- *A Smash-Up In China* (1919), Director
- *A Heathen Benefit* (1918), Director
- *Throwing the Bull* (1918), Director
- *Doing His Bit* (1918), Director
- *Policy and Pie* (1918), Director
- *Iska Worreh* (1917), Director
- *Der Captain Is Examined for Insurance* (1917), Director
- *Der Captain Discovers the North Pole* (1917), Director
- *Sharks Is Sharks* (1917), Director
- *The Spider and the Fly* (1917), Director
- *Krazy and Ignatz Discuss the Letter 'G'* (1916), Director
- *Introducing Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse* (1916), Director
- *Cartoons in the Country* (1915), Animation, Producer
- *Cartoons in a Seminary* (1915), Producer, Animation
- *Cartoons in the Hotel* (1915), Animation, Producer
- *The Mysterious Vamp*, Director

## Gallery

- ![American film director Gregory La Cava. Subjects: miscellaneous (1941)](https://film.one/media/person/1230124/gallery-55b56e27a5f2.jpg) American film director Gregory La Cava. Subjects: miscellaneous (1941) — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Gregory_La_Cava_%28SAYRE_5094%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Gregory La Cava](https://film.one/media/person/1230124/gallery-f6050c2667c7.jpg) Gregory La Cava — Paramount Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Gregory_La_Cava_1926.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Gregory La Cava](https://film.one/media/person/1230124/gallery-3364e0ddb8b8.jpg) Gregory La Cava — Image via TMDB

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 2 nominated

- 1938: Best Director (nominated), for *Stage Door*
- 1937: Best Director (nominated), for *My Man Godfrey*

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/gregory-la-cava