Arthur Freed (September 9, 1894 - April 12, 1973) was born Arthur Grossman in Charleston, South Carolina. He was an American lyricist and a Hollywood film producer.
Freed began his career in vaudeville, and he appeared with the Marx Brothers. He soon began to write songs, and was eventually hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For years, he wrote lyrics for numerous films, many set to music by Nacio Herb Brown.
In 1939 he was promoted to the position of producer, and helped elevate MGM as the studio of the musical. Freed chose to surround himself with film directors such as Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley. He also helped shape the careers of stars including Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Lena Horne, Jane Powell, Esther Williams, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller, Mickey Rooney, Vera-Ellen, and many others. He brought Fred Astaire to MGM after Astaire's tenure at RKO and coaxed him out of semi-retirement to star opposite Garland in Easter Parade. His team of writers, directors, composers and stars came to be known as the Freed Unit and produced a steady stream of popular, critically acclaimed musicals until the late 1950s.
Freed served as associate producer of The Wizard of Oz (1939), though his name does not appear on the actual screen credits, nor on posters used to publicize the film. His first solo credit as producer was the film version of Rodgers and Hart's smash Broadway musical Babes in Arms (also 1939), released only a few months after The Wizard of Oz, and in itself not a very distinguished film due to the fact that it gutted most of the original stage score. But it did star Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and was so successful that it ushered in a long series of "let's put on a show" "backyard" musicals, all starring Rooney and Garland. However, Freed did bring an outstanding amount of talent from the Broadway theaters to the MGM soundstages including Vincente Minnelli, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Roger Edens, Kay Thompson, Zero Mostel, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, choreographer Charles Walters, orchestrators Conrad Salinger, Johnny Green, Lennie Hayton, and many others.
He allowed his directors and choreographers free rein, something unheard of in those days of committee-produced film musicals, and is credited for furthering the boundaries of film musicals by allowing such moments in films as the fifteen-minute ballet at the end of An American in Paris (1951), after which the film concludes moments later with no further dialogue or singing, and he allowed the musical team of Lerner and Loewe complete control in their writing of Gigi (1958).
When Shirley Temple was 11, Arthur Freed exposed himself to her. In Temple's autobiography, Child Star, she wrote, "Having thought of him as a producer rather than exhibitor, I sat bolt upright." She says she laughed at him and walked away, which infuriated him.
Two of his films won the Academy Award for Best Picture: An American in Paris and Gigi. On the night that An American in Paris won Best Picture, Freed received an Honorary Oscar, and his version of Show Boat (1951) was also up for two Oscars that year, though it lost both to An American in Paris. But what is now his most highly regarded film, Singin' in the Rain (1952), won no Oscars whatsoever.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.
Freed left MGM in 1970 after failing for almost a decade to bring his dream project, a biopic of Irving Berlin entitled Say It With Music, to the screen. He died three years later surrounded by family.
