Kenneth Macgowan

Biography

Kenneth Macgowan was a theatrical producer who headed the Provincetown Playhouse in the 1920s with Eugene O'Neill, his close friend and Robert Edmond Jones. He produced plays on Broadway, giving Katherine Hepburn her first role. He moved out to Hollywood in the early 1930s, working for RKO, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. He produced the first full-length color film, Becky Sharp. His last film was a documentary was "Maya Through the Ages." He left Hollywood to found the first theatre and film school at UCLA in 1947. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote a dozen books on theatre, film and anthropology.