Ivan Moffat

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Ivan Moffat (born February 18, 1918 in Havana , Cuba , † July 4, 2002 in Los Angeles ) was a British screenwriter .

Life

Ivan Moffat was born in Havana in 1918 to the British actress and poet Iris Tree and the American photographer Curtis Moffat . Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Fitzroy Square in London . After attending Dartington Hall School in Totnes , Devon , Moffat studied at the London School of Economics . In 1938 Moffat's father returned to America. Like him, Ivan Moffat liked to be in artistic circles. So he met the writers Dylan Thomas , Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre , among others . During World War II , he served in a unit in the United States Army Signal Corps that was supposed to capture military operations on film. It was at this time that he met the director George Stevens , who made documentaries about the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris . After the war, Moffat went to Hollywood , where MGM wanted to hire him as a screenwriter. He turned down the offer, however, when Stevens took him under his wing and made him co-producer of his films in the early 1950s, including A Place in the Sun (1951) and My Great Friend Shane (1953).

Moffat wrote his first screenplay with Sonya Levien for George Cukor's Junction Bhowani (1956) with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger in the leading roles . For the extremely successful film epic Giants with Rock Hudson , Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean , Moffat adapted Edna Ferber 's bestselling novel of the same name together with Fred Guiol and received an Oscar nomination for it . After his participation in films with rather moderate success, including the Fitzgerald film Tender is the Night (1962), Moffat was able to do another with the script for John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday (1977), which he had written with Ernest Lehman and Kenneth Ross Land hit. In 1985 he wrote his last screenplay for the television film Florence Nightingale .

In Paris after the war, Moffat met his first wife, the Russian Natasha Sorokin. However, the connection that resulted in a daughter named Lorna only lasted a few years. As a bon vivant , who traveled a lot, he met the married writer Caroline Blackwood in Venice in 1956 . His daughter Ivana Lowell comes from a long-term affair with Blackwood. In 1961 he married Katharine Smith, the then 28-year-old daughter of the 3rd Viscount Hambledon, with whom he had two sons, Jonathan and Patrick. The marriage also ended in divorce in 1972. Moffat died of a stroke in 2002 at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the age of 84 . His grandfather was the theater manager and actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree , who started the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art .

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tom Vallance: Ivan Moffat. Oscar-nominated screenwriter for 'Giant' ( Memento from May 15, 2009 on the Internet Archive ). In The Independent , July 19, 2002.
  2. ↑ a b c Ivan Moffat . In: The Daily Telegraph , August 3, 2002.
  3. ↑ Ivan Moffat  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Variety , July 11, 2002.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.variety.com  
personal data
SURNAME Moffat, Ivan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Havana , Cuba
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 2002
Place of death los Angeles