Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart ( born November 30, 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, USA; † August 2, 1980 in London, England) was an American screenwriter, playwright and actor.
Life
Donald Stewart graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire U.S. state, and then the Yale University in New Haven ( Connecticut ), where he earned his bachelor's degree in English in 1916. After Stewart completed his military service in the United States Navy and served as a soldier in the First World War.
After he had lived after the war ended almost two years in Europe, 1920 Stewart moved to New York City, where he first tried it as a stockbroker. Since this career aspiration failed miserably, Stewart began writing screenplays and novels, although initially without success necessary. In New York, Stewart also met his first wife, Beatrice, whom he married in 1924. The couple had two sons, Ames and Donald. In 1938, Donald and Beatrice divorced.
End of 1927, Stewart's first play, Los Angeles, was brought to the stage on Broadway, and only a year later, in 1928, he was also an actor in the play Holiday on the theater stage.
1926 Stewarts piece Brown of Harvard was adapted into a screenplay and filmed by director Jack Conway. Stewart's experiments as an actor was the late 1920s / early 1930s hardly crowned with success, so that he is now completely devoted himself to writing screenplays. So he wrote with Harry d' Abbadie d' Arrast and Douglas Z. Doty 1930, the screenplay for Laughter and was nominated in 1931 along with his colleagues for the Oscar for Best Original Story. It should be ten years pass before him in 1941 again was given an Oscar nomination and an Academy Award in the category he won Best Adapted Screenplay for The night before the wedding.
Donald Stewart was also politically active. When in 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, he joined the active in the U.S. Anti- Nazi League, an association that was seen in the McCarthy era as a cell of the Communist Party. That's why Stewart got 1951 on the blacklist. To get away from the persecution in their own country, Stewart decided to go for some time to England. Here he was overtaken the next blow when he learned that the U.S. Department of Interior announced his passport void and forbade him an entry into the USA.
After he was able to write for only a handful of films screenplays in England, he sat down with his second wife Ella, whom he had married in 1939, to rest. Here he wrote in 1970 his autobiography. In London, even Donald O. Stewart died at age 85 of a heart attack.
Filmography (selection)
Screenplay
Based Upon