"In Old Arizona" Director & Actor Irving Cummings 1959 Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Irving Camisky aka Irving Cummings (October 9, 1888 – April 18, 1959) was an American movie actor, director, producer and writer.

Life and career

Cummings was born in New York City. He is the father of the screenwriter and producer Irving Cummings, Jr.

Cummings started his acting career in his late teens on Broadway stage, and appeared with the legendary Lillian Russell. (Later, he would direct a bio pic based on her life.)

He entered into movies in 1909 and quickly became a popular leading man. Few of the films he made as an actor are easily available, except for Buster Keaton's first feature film, The Saphead (1920), in which Cummings plays a crooked stockbroker and Fred Niblo's film Sex (1920), one of the first films to depict a new phenomenon in 1920s America, the Flapper. Both films are readily available on home video, as well as The Round-Up (1920), a Western drama starring Roscoe Arbuckle (with the famous tagline "Nobody loves a fat man") and featuring Wallace Beery. Around that time, he started to direct action movies and occasional comedies.

In 1929, Cummings was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of In Old Arizona.

In 1934, Cummings directed Grand Canary.

Cummings was known for the big splashy 1930s Technicolor musicals with popular leading ladies such as Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, and Shirley Temple (Little Miss Broadway, 1938) he directed at 20th Century Fox.

In 1943, as part of the 50th anniversary of the birth of the motion picture industry, Cummings was awarded the Thomas A. Edison Foundation Gold Medal for outstanding achievement in the arts and sciences.

Cummings died on April 18, 1959. He is buried with his wife, Ruth, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. 

Select filmography

Actor

The Stolen Woman (1913)

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1914)

The Three of Us (1914)

The Diamond from the Sky (1915)

The World's Great Snare (1916)

The Gilded Cage (1916)
The Whip (1917)
An American Widow (1917)
The Struggle Everlasting (1918)
The Interloper (1918)
Merely Players (1918)
The Woman Who Gave (1918)
Don't Change Your Husband (1919)
Mandarin's Gold (1919)
Her Code of Honor (1919)
The Scar (1919)
Some Bride (1919)

Secret Service (1919)

Men, Women, and Money (1919)
What Every Woman Learns (1919)
Auction of Souls (1919)
Everywoman (1919)
The Thirteenth Commandment (1920)
The Tree of Knowledge (1920)
Sex (1920)
Old Dad (1920)

The Saphead (1920)

The Round-Up (1920)
The Blasphemer (1921)

The Man from Hell's River (1922)

Flesh and Blood (1922)

East Side - West Side (1923)

As Man Desires (1925)

Infatuation (1925)
The Johnstown Flood (1926)

Dressed to Kill (1928)

The Port of Missing Girls (1928)

Romance of the Underworld (1928)

Not Quite Decent (1929)

Behind That Curtain (1929)
In Old Arizona (1929)
A Devil with Women (1930)
On the Level (1930)
A Holy Terror (1931)
The Night Club Lady (1932)
Grand Canary (1934)
The White Parade (1934)
Curly Top (1935)

Girls' Dormitory (1936)

Little Miss Broadway (1938)
Just Around the Corner (1938)
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939)
Hollywood Cavalcade (1939)
Everything Happens at Night (1939)
Down Argentine Way (1940)
That Night in Rio (1941)
Belle Starr (1941)

Louisiana Purchase (1941)

Springtime in the Rockies (1942)

My Gal Sal (1942)

What a Woman! (1943)
Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943)

The Dolly Sisters (1945)

Double Dynamite (1951)

Director

Paid Back (1922)
Rustling for Cupid (1926)

A Devil With Women (1930)