Background

Edward Anhalt was born on March 28, 1914, in New York City, New York, the United States.

Career

A cameraman for Columbia Pictures early in his career, Anhalt gained a clear understanding of how to write for the optimal filming of his scripts. He began as a writer for Columbia Pictures in 1947, and by 1950 was writing for Twentieth-Century-Fox.

When Anhalt was under contract to Paramount from 1961 to 1965, he devised a way of dealing with Hal Wallis, the head of the studio, who would roam the corridors of the writers' building listening for sounds of creativity. Anhalt simply played a tape of the sound of a busy typewriter whenever Wallis passed by. His Oscar-winning Best Screenplay, written under Wallis's aegis, was Becket (1964), rather deftly adapted from Jean Anouilh's chronicle play, though the characters, Thomas à Becket (Richard Burton) and King Henry II (Peter O'Toole), were revealed more through talk than action.

Anhalt's less prestigious work for the studio included the Elvis Presley vehicle Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), in which the star played a poor tuna fisherman, and Boeing Boeing (1965), which Anhalt fashioned from Marc Camoletti's farce for Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis. Also based on a play, but more personal for Anhalt, was Wives and Lovers (1963), about a successful writer (Van Johnson) on the brink of divorce.

Anhalt was married to his first wife Edna for 20 years, during which time they were writing partners. They began by churning out short stories for pulp magazines, under the pseudonym of Andrew Holt, and their first screenplay, credited to Holt, was Strange Voyage (1946), a lively "B" adventure directed by Irving Allen.

In 1950, under their real names, the Anhalts' won an Academy Award for Original Story for Elia Kazan's gripping urban thriller, Panic in the Streets, about the hunt for a gang of petty criminals carrying pneumonic plague. The couples' screenwriting breakthrough came with Fred Zinnemann's The Member of the Wedding (1952), adapted from Carson McCullers' successful Broadway play. It contained an "opened-out" sequence, not in the play, in which unhappy, reclusive adolescent Julie Harris goes to town and is pestered by a drunken GI. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer, for whom the couple continued to work.

Their Oscar-nominated story for Edward Dmytryk's taut psychological police drama The Sniper (1952), about a man who shoots women from rooftops, was based on research they did among men who were convicted of violent crimes against women. Anhalt later revisited similar territory with the much slicker The Boston Strangler (1968).

It was while writing the script for Kramer's first directorial effort, the labored medical drama Not as a Stranger (1955), based on Morton Thompson's thick bestseller, that the Anhalts began to battle with Columbia Studios and each other, leading to their divorce.

The last film Edward and Edna worked on together was Kramer's sprawling 130-minute epic, The Pride and the Passion (1957), for which they provided the empty rhetorical dialogue delivered without a conviction by the miscast trio of Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Sophia Loren.

Anhalt's first solo screenplay was for Dmytryk's The Young Lions (1958), based on the second world war novel by Irwin Shaw. On Marlon Brando's insistence, Anhalt had to soften the Nazi character, but the writer was instrumental in getting Dean Martin cast in his first non-comic role. In Love and War (1958) also contrasted the effects of the second world war on three soldiers, but this time in a soap opera manner. Even sudsier was The Restless Years (1958), a Peyton-Place type story featuring blonde teen idol Sandra Dee, and The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961) starring Angie Dickinson as an African missionary. Juvenile delinquency was the fashionable theme of John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages (1961), with a banal message rammed home about social conditions, but at least co-writer Anhalt got to grips with more realistic dialogue.

In his effective screenplay for Hour of the Gun (1967), directed by John Sturges, Anhalt (who appears briefly as a medic) takes up the Western story after the gunfight at the OK Corral, giving it a bitter, violent tone, making Wyatt Earp (James Garner) a cold-blooded killer and Doc Holliday (Jason Robards) ever more whisky-sodden. Another Western, which gained Anhalt a Western Hall of Fame award, although co-written with John Milius, was Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnston (1972). The best of the cycle of "wilderness" movies of the early 70s, it starred a hirsute Robert Redford as a trapper trying to survive in the mountains, where hostile Indians lurk. Much of Anhalt's later work was done for TV, including the fourth (updated) version of the melodrama Madame X, in which the writer appeared as a judge, and in which his third wife Camilla Carr had a role.

Achievements

• Edward Anhalt was a prolific talented screenwriter, whose works brought him several Academy Awards and nominations. He was also a recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Works

More photos

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  • Satan Bug

    (John Sturges directed this sizzling suspenser about a ner...)

    1965
  • Jeremiah Johnson

    (Robert Redford stars in this powerful epic of a man who t...)

    1972
  • Escape to Athena

    (A World War II adventure, involving a group of Allied POW...)

    1979
  • The Boston Strangler

    (A gripping account of the real-life serial killer who sta...)

    1968
  • Man In The Glass Booth

    (Seemingly at the edge of sanity, Goldman holds forth on e...)

    1975
  • Panic In The Streets

    (A New Orleans physician leads a manhunt for two fugitive ...)

    1950
  • The Member of the Wedding

    (The Member of the Wedding (1952), a sensitive film versio...)

    1952
  • Green Ice

    (A down on his luck engineer gets involved in an adventure...)

    1981
  • The Holcroft Covenant

    (Noel Holcroft is astonished to learn that he is about to ...)

    1985
  • The Madwoman Of Chaillot

    (Life is a Sunday in the park for Aurelia, a dotty Parisia...)

    1969
  • The Young Lions

    (The destiny of two soldiers during World War II. The Germ...)

    1958

Connections

Edward Anhalt was married five times.

Spouse:

Huguette Patenaude

ex-wife:

Edna Anhalt

ex-wife:

Camilla Carr

Daughter:

Julie Anhalt Rice

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001