Background

Douglas Day Stewart was born on January 1, 1940, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States to the family of Worley Williams Stewart and Dorothy Day.

Education

Douglas Day Stewart graduated from Claremont Men’s College (now Claremont McKenna College) as a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. He received a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern University in 1967.

Career

Douglas Day Stewart is best known for his original screenplay An Officer and a Gentleman, which was based on his own experiences as a Naval Officer Candidate in 1965, undergoing rigorous training while dating a local factory girl. In addition to the many accolades and awards garnered by the film, “Officer” was recently listed by the American Film Institute as one of the ten highest-grossing love stories in cinema history.

A medical problem would knock Stewart out of his dream to fly jets but he would go on to serve on a top-secret team of Naval and Marine officers that sent the entire population of Marines at Camp Pendleton to Vietnam, thus ending the United States’ “police action” and starting “The Vietnam War.”

Other writing credits include the enduring first Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields, the acclaimed The Boy In the Plastic Bubble, (the ABC television movie that launched John Travolta’s career), and The Scarlet Letter, take on Hawthorne’s classic novel, starring Demi Moore. Stewart wrote and directed the cult favorite Thief of Hearts (which boasts clubs of devoted women around the United States) and the controversial Listen to Me, about college debaters forced to take both sides of the abortion issue.

Stewart completed his screenplay An Officer and a Gentleman - The Final Act, the long-awaited sequel to his original, which will go before cameras, starring the original actors along with a young leading lady who will play Zack and Paula’s daughter as she relives her father’s journey from the first film.

Achievements

• Douglas Day Stewart managed to build a reputation of a screenwriter that creates genuinely satisfying Hollywood love stories, the kind of well-produced movie that leaves the watcher content. He has been nominated for an Academy Award, an Emmy, and for numerous Writers Guild Awards.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • An Officer and a Gentleman

    (Loner Zack Mayo (Richard Gere) enters Officer Candidate S...)

    1982
  • Bonanza

    (The adventures of Ben Cartwright and his sons as they run...)

    1972
  • The Other Side Of The Mountain Part II

    (The story of Jill Kinmont continues as the paralyzed form...)

    1978
  • The Boy in the Plastic Bubble

    (The girl next door makes a teen (John Travolta) born with...)

    1976
  • Watch Listen To Me

    (A group of college debaters learn about the world, friend...)

    1989
  • Thief Of Hearts

    (If you met Ray and Mickey Davis, you'd swear they had a p...)

    1984
  • The Scarlet Letter

    (A beautiful, intelligent woman has an affair. Rather than...)

    1995
  • The Blue Lagoon

    (Directed by Randal Kleiser. With Brooke Shields, Christop...)

    1980
  • Silver Strand

    (Directed by George Miller. With Nicollette Sheridan, Gil ...)

    1995
  • Room 222 1971
  • Cannon 1972
  • Murder or Mercy 1974
  • Gone with the West 1974

Views

Quotations: "I was an artist, an actor, and one day I was visiting my parents’ house still in make-up where I met an officer who told me we were about to go to war, though people didn’t really know anything about it yet. He said I could join the Army where I’d probably die on some muddy battlefield or join the Navy and live through the whole thing. I wanted to live so I went to Newport Rhode Island (Naval War College) for 12 weeks."

Connections

Douglas Day Stewart married Joani Justus, on February 27, 1971, which whom he has two sons, Dylan Justus Stewart (a professional freelance Macintosh consultant) and Sean Douglas Stewart (a musician, known as Sean Douglas). His next wife was an actress and producer Ally Downs whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1996 and with whom he has a daughter Shady Day Stewart (a fashion sales manager for Alexandra von Furstenberg). He is currently married to an artist Judith Gersten.

Father:

Worley Williams Stewart

Mother:

Dorothy Day

ex-wife:

Joani Justus

Son:

Dylan Justus Stewart

Son:

Sean Douglas Stewart

More known as Sean Douglas.

ex-wife:

Ally Downs

Daughter:

Shady Day Stewart

Wife:

Judith Gersten

colleague:

Randal Kleiser

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998