Kramer attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he graduated at age fifteen. He then enrolled in New York University where he became a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and wrote a weekly column for the Medley newspaper. He graduated in 1933 at the age of nineteen with a degree in business administration. After developing a “zest for writing” with a newspaper, notes biographer Donald Spoto, he was offered a paid internship in the writing department of 20th Century Fox and moved to Hollywood. Until receiving that writing job, he had planned to enroll in law school.

Ship of Fools (1965) has been described as a “floating Grand Hotel,” an earlier film which also had an all-star cast. Its multi-strand narrative deals with the failing personal relationships among the passengers on board a passenger liner returning to Germany in 1933, during the rise of Nazism. Spoto describes its theme as one of “conscious social and psychological significance.” It won two Academy Awards and was nominated for six others.

He was drafted into the Army in 1943, during World War II, where he helped make training films with the Signal Corps in New York, along with other Hollywood filmmakers including Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak. He left the army with the rank of first lieutenant.

After the war, Kramer soon discovered that there were no available jobs in Hollywood in 1947, so he created an independent production company, Screen Plays Inc. He partnered writer Herbie Baker, publicist George Glass and producer Carl Foreman, an army friend from the film unit. Foreman justified the production company by noting that the big studios had become “dinosaurs,” which, being shocked by the onrush of television, “jettisoned virtually everything to survive.” But they failed to develop cadres of younger creative talent in their wake.

Also released in 1950 was Kramer’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac, the first English language film version of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 French play. It made a star of José Ferrer, who won his only Oscar for Best Actor.

In 1951, Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn offered Kramer’s company an opportunity to form a production unit working with his studio. Kramer was given free rein over what films he chose to make, along with a budget of nearly a million dollars each. Kramer agreed to a five-year contract during which time he would produce twenty films. However, Kramer would later state that the agreement was “one of the most dangerous and foolhardy moves of my entire career.” He agreed to the commitment because of his “deep-seated desire to direct,” he states, along with the security of ready studio financing.

In 1953 Cohn and Kramer agreed to terminate the five-year, 20-film contract Kramer had signed. However, his last Columbia film, The Caine Mutiny (1954), regained all of the losses Columbia had incurred as a result of his earlier projects. The Caine Mutiny, was an adaptation of the book written by Herman Wouk and was directed by Edward Dmytryk.

Kramer produced and directed 23 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, with José Ferrer, Gary Cooper, Maximilian Schell and Katharine Hepburn winning for their performances. Kramer’s was among the first stars to be completed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 28, 1960, out of the original 1,550 stars created and installed as a unit in 1960.

In 1997, Kramer published his autobiography A Mad Mad Mad Mad World: A Life in Hollywood.

He died on February 19, 2001 in Los Angeles, aged 87, after contracting pneumonia. He was married three times and divorced twice. He was survived by his third wife, Karen, and four children: Casey and Larry (with Anne Pearce), and Katharine and Jennifer (with Karen Sharpe).

The Producers Guild of America established the Stanley Kramer Award in 2002 to honor a production or individuals whose contribution illuminates and raises public awareness of important social issues. Recent winners include Loving, The Hunting Ground, and The Normal Heart.