Donald Ogden Stewart
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Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) an American author and screenwriter from Columbus, Ohio.
He graduated from Yale University in 1916 and was in the Naval Reserves in World War I. After that he became interested in writing and found success with A Parody Outline of History which is an intentional satire of the 1920 edition of The Outline of History by H. G. Wells. This led him to becoming a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Around that time a friend of his got him interested in theater and he became a noted playwright on Broadway in the 1920s. He was friends with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman.
He became interested in adapting some of his plays to film, but on first entering Hollywood he had to adapt the plays of others as his own were initially shelved. This led to Stewart moving to Hollywood. Once there he mostly wrote, but he also acted in a supporting role in the film Not so Dumb. By the 1930s he had become known primarily as a sceenwriter. He won an Academy Award for writing The Philadelphia Story (1940).
As the war approached he became a member of the "Hollywood Anti-Nazi League." During the Communist Red Scare this organization was suspected as a Communist front so Stewart was blacklisted in 1950. In 1951 he emigrated to England due to the blacklist. While in England he wrote his 1975 memoir By a Stroke of Luck. He died in London in 1980 and was survived by his widow Ella Winter. They had been married for over 40 years, but he also had a previous marriage which produced two sons.
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[edit] Partial filmography
[edit] As a writer
- Love and Death (1975) (uncredited)
- Summertime (1955) (uncredited)
- The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) (additional dialogue) (originally uncredited)
- Edward, My Son (1949)
- Cass Timberlane (1947) (adaptation)
- Life with Father (1947)
- Without Love (1945)
- Forever and a Day (1943)
- Keeper of the Flame (1942) (screenplay)
- Tales of Manhattan (1942)
- Smilin' Through (1941) (screenplay)
- A Woman's Face (1941)
- That Uncertain Feeling (1941) (screenplay), aka Ernst Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling (USA: complete title)
- Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman (1940) (additional dialogue), aka Kitty Foyle (USA: short title)
- The Philadelphia Story (1940) (screenplay)
- The Night of Nights (1939) (also story)
- Love Affair (1939)
- Marie Antoinette (1938) (screenplay)
- Holiday (1938) (screenplay)
- The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) (additional dialogue)
- Dinner at Eight (1933) (additional dialogue)
- Another Language (1933)
- The White Sister (1933)
- Smilin' Through (1932) (dialogue)
- Rebound (1931) (based on his play of the same name)
- Tarnished Lady (1931) (also story New York Lady)
- Finn and Hattie (1931) (novel Mr and Mrs Haddock Abroad)
- Laughter (1930)
- Humorous Flights (1929)
- Traffic Regulations (1929)
- Brown of Harvard (1926) (adaptation)
[edit] As an actor
- Not So Dumb (1930) .... Skylar Van Dyke/Horace Patterson
- Night Club (1929/I)
- Humorous Flights (1929) .... Donald Ogden Stewart
