THE WRITER: Donald Ogden Stewart
Donald Ogden Stewart (November 30, 1894 - August 2, 1980) was an American author and screenwriter, best known for his sophisticated golden era comedies and melodramas, such as The Philadelphia Story (based on the play by Philip Barry), Tarnished Lady, and Love Affair. Stewart worked with a number of the great directors of his time, including George Cukor (a frequent collaborator), Michael Curtiz, and Ernst Lubitsch. Stewart was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table, and, with Ernest Hemingway's friend Bill Smith, the model for Bill Gorton in “The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway.”
After tWorld War I, he started to write, and found success with “A Parody Outline of History,” a satire of “The Outline of History” (1920) 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, George S. Kaufman, and Ernest Hemingway, who partly based the character of Bill Gorton in “The Sun Also Rises on Stewart.”
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. By the 1930s he had become known primarily as a screenwriter and won an Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story (1940). As World War II approached, he became a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and admitted to being a member of the Communist Party USA at one of its public meetings. During the Second Red Scare Stewart was blacklisted in 1950 and the following year he and his wife, activist and writer Ella Winter, emigrated to England. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
He died in London in 1980. His widow died the same year.