Roy Rowland

Motion Picture Director. After law studies at USC, he joined MGM in the early 1930s as a script clerk and soon moved up to the staff of the short subject unit there. In 1936 he started directing shorts, among them segments of the "Crime Does Not Pay" and Robert Benchley's "How To" series. Given the chance to make feature films in 1943, Rowland worked mostly for MGM until the end of the 1950s, helming such productions as "Lost Angel" (1944), "Our Vines Have Tender Grapes" (1945), "Killer McCoy" (1947), "The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T" (1953), the gangster classic "Rogue Cop" (1954, starring Robert Taylor), "Witness to Murder" (1954), "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956), "Gun Glory" (1957) and "The Seven Hills of Rome" (1958, with Mario Lanza). During the 1960s he worked mostly in Europe, directing Mickey Spillane's "The Girl Hunters" (1964, starring Spillane himself) in England, afterwards making a handful of co-productions in Italy and Spain, including the Western "Sie nannten ihn Gringo" (1965) and a few Swashbuckling vehicles, retiring around 1970. Married to a sister of MGM producer Jack Cummings, he was the father of actor Steve Rowland.