Personal Life
Selznick married Irene Gladys Mayer, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, in 1930. They separated in 1945 and divorced in 1948. They had two sons, Daniel and Jeffrey Selznick. In 1949 he married actress Jennifer Jones and they had one daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick (1954–1976), who committed suicide by jumping from a 20th-floor window in Los Angeles on May 11, 1976.
Selznick was an amphetamine user, and would often dictate long and rambling memos under the influence of amphetamine to his directors. The documentary Shadowing The Third Man relates that Selznick introduced The Third Man director Carol Reed to the use of amphetamine, which allowed Reed to bring the picture in below budget and on schedule by filming nearly 22 hours at a time.
Read more about this topic: David O. Selznick
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)