Background
Harry Cohn was born on July 23, 1891 in New York City, United States.
Harry Cohn was born on July 23, 1891 in New York City, United States.
Cohn left school at fourteen.
After a series of odd jobs, he formed a vaudeville partnership with pianist Harry Rubinstein (later the songwriter, Harry Ruby). When the act broke up, Cohn worked for a time as a streetcar conductor and then returned to show business as a song plugger.
In 1918 he joined his brother Jack at Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios, as Laemmle’s secretary. In 1920 the brothers, along with another Laemmle employee, Joe Brandt, broke away to form their own company, named CBC (Cohn-Brandt-Cohn).
Columbia Pictures become the company’s new name in 1924, after the partners had wearied of being referred to as "Corned Beef and Cabbage."
Unlike most of his fellow moguls, who were well entrenched as bosses of major studios by the early 1920s, Cohn was in charge of an enterprise that was considered “poverty row” until the mid thirties. Under his guidance (Brandt departed in 1931, leaving Jack to run the New York office) Columbia enjoyed slow, but steady growth and was relatively unharmed by the economic depression. Cohn’s biggest asset was director Frank Capra, who joined Columbia in 1927. The enormous success of his film, "It Happened One Night", in 1934, made Columbia a force in the industry and it was Capra who directed all, but two of the films that brought the studio Oscars in the 1930s.
Cohn was no remote administrator and brought his often abrasive personality to bear on all aspects of the running of his studio. Many of his personal interventions were unfortunate (he told Humphrey Bogart that his talents lay in the theater, not the cinema).
As the old studio system faded, Cohn still prospered with hits on the scale of "From Here To Eternity", "On the Waterfront", and "The Bridge on the River Kwai", in part because of his willingness to pioneer in the production and sale of films for television.
Cohn was married to Rose Barker from 1923 to 1941, and to actress Joan Perry from July 1941.