Quick Facts
LibraBiography
Irving Camisky (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. 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 1920sAmerica, 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 1934, Cummings directed Grand Canary, and in 1929, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his direction of In Old Arizona.
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.
Select filmography
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Actor
- 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)
- Sister Against Sister (1917)
- A Royal Romance (1917)
- Wrath of Love (1917)
- Rasputin, The Black Monk (1917)
- An American Widow (1917)
- The Struggle Everlasting (1918)
- The Heart of a Girl (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)
- Harriet and the Piper (1920)
- The Saphead (1920)
- The Round-Up (1920)
- Old Dad (1920)
- The Blasphemer (1921)
- The Man from Hell's River (1922)
- Flesh and Blood (1922)
- East Side - West Side (1923)
- Rupert of Hentzau (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)
- The Jilt (1922)
- Rustling for Cupid (1926)
