Cedric Gibbons

Cedric Gibbons was born in Dublin in 1890 and raised in New York, the son of an architect whose drafting tables he grew up beside. He learned design in his father's office and broke into pictures in the 1910s at the Edison company, then followed the young producers who would build the West Coast studios. When Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer merged in 1924 to form MGM, Gibbons was named supervising art director, a post he would hold for thirty-two years.

His genius was as much organizational as aesthetic. Gibbons built the largest and most disciplined art department in the world and negotiated a contract that placed his name on nearly every one of the roughly 1,500 films MGM produced during his tenure, whether or not he personally touched them. Beneath that credit worked dozens of gifted unit designers, but the overall taste was unmistakably his: sleek Art Deco interiors, gleaming white walls, sweeping staircases, a clean modern glamour that came to define what audiences understood as movie luxury. Films from The Merry Widow to Pride and Prejudice, Gaslight, An American in Paris and Julius Caesar carried his signature.

In 1928, the fledgling Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—of which Gibbons was a founding member—asked him to design its award. He sketched a knight standing on a reel of film, gripping a crusader's sword, and handed the sculpting to artist George Stanley. The result was the Oscar, an object he would go on to win more times than any individual in history: eleven statuettes from a record thirty-nine nominations.

Married for years to the actress Dolores del Río, Gibbons cultivated an air of continental sophistication that matched his sets. He retired from MGM in 1956 as the old studio system was cracking, and died in 1960. Though few casual moviegoers know his name, almost everyone has held his most famous design in their imagination, and every gilded backdrop of Hollywood's golden age owes something to the standard he set.