Background

Ernest Gébler was born in Dublin, Ireland on December 31, 1914. He was one of five children of Adolf Gébler, a shopkeeper and musician, who had married a theatre usherette.

Career

Gebler's 1950 novel, The Plymouth Adventure: The Voyage of the Mayflower, was adapted for a film with Spencer Tracy in the leading role. Based on extensive research, the book described the voyage to the New World aboard the Mayflower and was an international bestseller. Gebler also tried his hand at plays, including She Sits There Smiling, Kingdom Come and A Cry for Help. Among Gebler's other novels are He Had My Heart Scalded, A Week in the Country, The Love Investigator, The Old Man and the Girl, A Civilized Life, Not the End of the World and Hoffman.

With his second wife Edna O'Brien, Gebler wrote the screenplay The Girl with Green Eyes, which was based on a novel by O’Brien called The Lonely Girl. He wrote several scripts based on his novels, including The Love Investigator and Hoffman. Gebler also wrote the screenplay for Day of Freedom. He was a successful writer for the small screen as well, crafting Call Me Daddy in 1968.

Achievements

• Gebler's television script Call Me Daddy was honored with an Emmy Award in the United States in 1968 and with an International Award for Entertainment from the British National Academy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Plymouth Adventure

    (Condensed and simplified for quick reading by Evelyn Sibl...)

    1954
  • Shall I Eat You Now? 1969
  • The old man and the girl 1968
  • The Love Investigator 1960
  • A Week in The Country 1957

Views

Quotations: "I take an Edna O’Brien into my life carelessly. And suffer ten years."

Membership

Gebler was a member of Aosdána, an Irish association of artists.

Personality

Ernest Gébler had enigmatic and troubled personality and was a person very hard to please. Gebler was envious and resentful of his nearest and dearest’s successes – envy seems to have been a Gébler family failing.

Quotes from others about the person

• Carlo Gébler: ''At first, when he [Ernest Gébler] started talking, my father was angry. However, the longer he spoke about the degenerate genes passed from my grandfather to my mother and then to me, the more gleeful he became.''

Connections

Leatrice Joy Gilbert was Gebler's first wife, they had a son John Karl. He had been married to the writer Edna O’Brien for ten years from 1954 and they had two sons, the novelist Carlo Gebler and Sasha Gebler, who became respectively a writer and an architect.

1-st wife:

Leatrice Joy Gilbert

2-nd wife:

Edna O’Brien

Son:

John Karl Gebler

Son:

Carlo Gebler

Son:

Sasha Gebler

References

• Father & I: A Memoir This intensely moving memoir recounts the painful, mutually destructive relationship between a father and a son. The child of gifted writers Ernest Gebler and Edna O'Brien, Carlos Gebler was never able to establish a warm connection with his aloof, domineering father. When O'Brien's fame began to overshadow that of her jealous husband, their already tenuous marriage self-destructed, leaving their children caught in the middle.
  2001