Samuel Goldwyn (/ˈɡoʊldwɪn/; born Szmuel Gelbfisz; Yiddish: שמואל געלבפֿיש; August 27, 1882 (claimed but most likely July 1879) – January 31, 1974), also known as Samuel Goldfish,[1] was a Polish-born American film producer and pioneer in the American film industry, who produced Hollywood's first major motion picture.

On November 26, 1898, Gelbfisz left Hamburg for Birmingham, England, where he remained with relatives for six weeks under the name Samuel Goldfish.

Film rights for a stage play, The Squaw Man, were purchased for $4,000 and Dustin Farnum was hired for the leading role.

Looking for more movies to distribute, Paramount signed a contract with the Lasky Company on 1 June 1914 to supply 36 films per year.

[10] In 1916, Goldfish partnered with Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn,[11] using a combination of both names to call their film-making enterprise Goldwyn Pictures.

[citation needed] For 35 years, Goldwyn built a reputation in filmmaking and developed an eye for finding the talent for making films.

William Wyler directed many of his most celebrated productions, and he hired writers such as Ben Hecht, Sidney Howard, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman.

(According to legend, at a heated story conference, Goldwyn scolded someone—in most accounts, Mrs. Parker, who recalled he had once been a glove maker—who responded to him, "Don't you point that finger at me.

William Wyler was responsible for most of Goldwyn's highly lauded films, with Best Picture Oscar nominations for Dodsworth (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

In 1946, the year he was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, Goldwyn's drama, The Best Years of Our Lives, starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Teresa Wright and Dana Andrews, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

It was also a critical and financial failure, and the Gershwin family reportedly disliked the film and eventually pulled it from distribution.

Its reception was a major disappointment for Goldwyn, who, according to biographer Arthur Marx, saw it as his crowning glory and had wanted to film Porgy and Bess since he first saw it onstage in 1935.

Goldwyn's house at 1200 Laurel Lane in Beverly Hills was completed in 1934, designed by Douglas Honnold and George Vernon Russell.

There is a theater named after him in Beverly Hills and he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1631 Vine Street for his contributions to motion pictures on February 8, 1960.

Several years later, the Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust and Warner Bros. acquired the rights to all the Goldwyn-produced films except The Hurricane, which was returned to MGM subsidiary United Artists.

Goldwyn was also known for his malapropisms, paradoxes, and other speech errors called 'Goldwynisms' ("a humorous statement or phrase resulting from the use of incongruous or contradictory words, situations, idioms, etc.")

"[25] In the Grateful Dead's "Scarlet Begonias", the line "I ain't often right, but I've never been wrong" appears in the bridge.