26 Facts About Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Emma Arzner was an American film director whose career in Hollywood spanned from the silent era of the 1920s into the early 1940s.

Dorothy Arzner was one of a very few women able to establish a successful and long career in Hollywood as a film director until the 1970s.

Dorothy Arzner made a total of twenty films between 1927 and 1943 and launched the careers of a number of Hollywood actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball.

Dorothy Arzner was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America and the first woman to direct a sound film.

Dorothy Arzner was born in San Francisco, California, in 1897 to Jenetter and Louis Dorothy Arzner but grew up in Los Angeles, where her father owned the Hoffman Cafe, "a famous Hollywood restaurant next to a theatre".

Dorothy Arzner told the Sunday Star in 1929 that the friend thought she would be well suited to the industry.

When Dorothy Arzner met with DeMille in 1919, he asked her in which department she would like to start working.

Dorothy Arzner's success led Paramount to hire her as director for three more silent films, Ten Modern Commandments, Get Your Man, and Manhattan Cocktail, after which she was entrusted to direct the studio's first talking picture, The Wild Party, a remake of a silent film that Dorothy Arzner had edited.

Many of Dorothy Arzner's films had a similar theme of unconventional romance; The Wild Party is about a college student who is attracted to one of her teachers.

Dorothy Arzner worked with RKO, United Artists, Columbia, and MGM during this time.

Dance, Girl, Dance is one of Dorothy Arzner's most celebrated films.

Dance, Girl, Dance is yet another example of the ways in which Dorothy Arzner subverted and complicated traditional depictions of women and female-female relationships.

In 1943, after making First Comes Courage, Dorothy Arzner retired from Hollywood.

Dorothy Arzner made Women's Army Corps training films during World War II.

In 1950, Dorothy Arzner became associated with the Pasadena Playhouse, a well-known theatre company in southern California, where she founded film-making classes.

Dorothy Arzner produced some plays and starred in a radio program called You Wanna Be a Star.

Dorothy Arzner taught first-year courses in cinema at the university.

Dorothy Arzner made a series of successful commercials for Pepsi, most of them with Crawford.

In 1961, Dorothy Arzner joined the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, in the Motion Picture division as a staff member, where she spent four years supervising advanced cinema classes before retiring in June 1965.

Dorothy Arzner was born in San Francisco, California on January 3,1897, then moved with her parents, Louis and Jenetter Arzner, to Los Angeles, where her father opened a very prestigious restaurant next to a theatre in Hollywood.

Dorothy Arzner spent her childhood surrounded by celebrities who came to the restaurant, including Maude Adams, Sarah Bernhardt, and David Warfield, among others, but she was so used to them that she was never attracted to the cinema world.

Dorothy Arzner would maintain a forty-year relationship with Marion Morgan, a dancer and choreographer who was sixteen years older than Dorothy Arzner.

In 1979, at the age of 82, Dorothy Arzner died in La Quinta, California.

Dorothy Arzner's films inspired some of the earliest forms of feminist film criticism, including Claire Johnston's landmark 1973 essay, "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema".

Dorothy Arzner's films are notable for the depictions of women's relationships, with Arnzer typically reversing societal expectations of women, allowing them to find solidarity with one another.

Louisa Wei's 2014 feature documentary, Golden Gate Girls, compares the news media representation of Dorothy Arzner with that of Esther Eng, Hong Kong's first female director who was a Chinese American.