[3][4] He left school early and had a variety of jobs, including chorus boy, fur salesman, pool hustler, shipping clerk, streetcar conductor and song plugger for a sheet music printer.

[6] In 1919, Cohn joined his brother and fellow IMP employee Joe Brandt, to found CBC Film Sales Corporation.

The relationship between the two brothers was not always good, and Brandt, finding the partnership stressful, eventually sold his third of the company to Harry, who took over as president, by which time the firm had been renamed Columbia Pictures Corporation.

Columbia expanded its scope to offer moviegoers a regular program of economically made features, short subjects, serials, travelogues, sports reels, and cartoons.

Columbia released a few "class" productions each year (Lost Horizon, Holiday, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Jolson Story, Gilda, All the King's Men, etc.

Instead, he generally signed actors who usually worked for more expensive studios (Wheeler & Woolsey, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Lamour, Mickey Rooney, Chester Morris, Warren William, Warner Baxter, Sabu, Gloria Jean, Margaret O'Brien, etc.)

Columbia's own stars generally rose from the ranks of small-part actors and featured players (Jean Arthur, Rita Hayworth, Larry Parks, Julie Bishop, Lloyd Bridges, Bruce Bennett, Jock Mahoney, etc.).

He had a long-standing friendship with Chicago mobster John Roselli, and New Jersey mob boss Abner Zwillman was the source of the loan that allowed Cohn to buy out his partner Brandt.

The characters played by Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men (1949) and Born Yesterday (1950), both Columbia pictures, are allegedly based on Cohn, as is Jack Woltz, a movie mogul who appears in The Godfather (1972) as well as Rod Steiger in The Big Knife.

Cohn eventually relented, but made good on his vow that Hazel Scott would never set foot on a Hollywood studio as long as he lived.

[10] Cohn also resented Loretta Young having a dress redesigned expensively, which he regarded as overcharging him for her wardrobe, and wouldn't speak to her for many years until she apologized to him in person.

As well as co-founder Jack, the eldest brother Maxwell was a shorts subject producer and Nathan was the New York division manager.

[15][16] According to writer Joseph McBride, Jean Arthur quit the film industry when her Columbia Pictures' contract expired in 1944 because Cohn was known to harass actresses.

[17] When Joan Crawford was subjected to Cohn's advances after signing a three-picture contract with Columbia, she quickly stopped him by saying "Keep it in your pants, Harry.

In 1957, mobsters threatened Sammy Davis Jr. with violence because the performer was involved with actress Kim Novak, who was under contract with Columbia Pictures.

Practically the entire Hollywood community attended Cohn's extravagant funeral on stage 12 at the Columbia studios [1] where Red Skelton made the famous (possibly apocryphal) quote: "It proves what Harry always said: Give the public what they want and they'll come out for it.