Douglas Shearer

Douglas Graham Shearer (November 17, 1899 – January 5, 1971) was a Canadian American pioneering sound designer and recording director who played a key role in the advancement of sound technology for motion pictures. The elder brother of actress Norma Shearer, he won seven Academy Awards for his work. In 2008, he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. Early life and career Shearer was born in Westmount, Quebec, to a prominent family that fell on hard times after his father's business failed, which ultimately led to his parents' separation. Douglas remained with his father Andrew in Montreal while his two younger sisters, Norma Shearer (the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star) and Athole Shearer (also a Hollywood actress and one-time wife of director Howard Hawks), moved to the United States—to New York City—with their mother, Edith. Unable to afford a university education, Douglas Shearer left school and began working in a variety of jobs. In 1924, he traveled to Hollywood, California, to visit his mother and sisters, who had moved there a few years earlier. He decided to remain there too, finding a job at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Norma was already under contract. At MGM, working as an assistant in the studio's camera department, he pursued an interest in adding sound to film. That interest led to a career that spanned more than four decades in motion pictures. "What I knew about sound you could have put in a nutshell," he said. "Overnight I became the one-man sound department. They ordered me to do the job; they didn't give it to me. And probably they wouldn't have given it to me except that they were desperate."