He is the first director to win three major categories at the Academy Awards--Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing, Original Story, for Going My Way (1944).
He was a practicing criminal defense attorney for a short time in Los Angeles and San Francisco. McCarey often told a story about his last case when he was conned into defending a wife-beater, who chased him out of court and down the street. That incident was the conclusion of his legal career. McCarey would later claim that he never won a single case.
In The Godfather (1972), his name appears outside of Radio City Music Hall, which is playing his popular film The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), as Michael is walking with Kay and reads about his father's attempted assassination from a newspaper headline.
In August 2006, an Oscar statuette described as McCarey's Best Director award for Going My Way (1944) was going to be auctioned online, and was expected to sell for at least $100,000 (US). The auction was canceled after the award was found to be counterfeit. McCarey's daughter said she still had all three of her father's Oscars. The base was authentic, but the original nameplate had been removed and replaced with a fake one. The statuette also weighed about a pound more than a real one.
In Newsweek Magazine famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) his number one most important film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly".
Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
It is widely believed that many aspects of McCarey's films were based on his personal history.
Named after his French-born mother, Leona (Mistrot) McCarey.
Pressured by his father to study law at USC.
The opening sequences of Nickelodeon (1976) in which Ryan O'Neal's character, Leo Harrigan, a lawyer who intentionally loses a case and is chased out of the courtroom by his enraged client, are inspired by actual events that happened to McCarey, who was once a criminal defense lawyer and was defending a wife-beater who chased him out of the courtroom and down the street.
Was considered one of the most handsome directors in Hollywood, and some said as good looking as Cary Grant, whom he directed in four films.