MERVYN LEROY 

Vintage, typed letter, 1 page, 10" x 8", December 29, 1938 

to MGM Studio Executive Eddie Mannix, 

who is staying at the Arizona Inn, in Tucson

 thanking him for a Christmas gift of pears

Signed: "Mervyn"

Condition: fine

Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director, producer who began his career in vaudeville. 

He was the versatile movie director of such explosive dramas as Little Caesar (1931) and I Am a

Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and such lush romances as Waterloo Bridge (1940) and Random

Harvest (1942).

He directed the musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), the biographical  Madame Curie

(1943), the wartime drama Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), the religious epic Quo Vadis (1951), and

the comedy Mister Roberts (1955). 

As head of production at MGM he was responsible for the decision 

to make The Wizard of Oz (1939) and discovering Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Robert Mitchum and Lana

Turner. He received an honorary Academy Award for The House I Live In (1945) a ten-minute short 

starring Frank Sinatra made to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice after WWII. 

In 1976 he

received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. 

Born: 1900, San Francisco, California; died: 1987, Beverly Hills, California.