Edward Anhalt

American screenwriter
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Edward Anhalt (March 28, 1914 – September 3, 2000) was an American screenwriter, producer, and documentary filmmaker. After working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker for Pathé and CBS TV, he teamed with his wife Edna Anhalt, one of his five wives, during World War II to write pulp fiction. As a screenwriter, Anhalt won two Academy Awards: He shared the Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story with his wife Edna Anhalt for Panic in the Streets (1950) and a second Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Becket (1964).

Anhalt was born in New York City. He began writing at the age of 15, with his first play being On the Rocks: A Political Comedy by George Bernard Shaw. He got criticized by Shaw for messing with his work, and went to attend Columbia and Princeton universities instead.

During World War II, Anhalt served with the Army Air Force's First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California as a scenarist for training films. After the war, Anhalt graduated to writing screenplays for thrillers, initially using the joint pseudonym Andrew Holt. The works by him and his wife, Edna Anhalt had attracted Hollywood, and they moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he made his first screenwriting debut in 1946 with Strange Voyage. the husband and wife team returned to Columbia as writer producers, earning another Academy Award nomination for their story to the thriller The Sniper in 1952. The Anhalts wrote the 1952 screen version of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, which preserved the stage performances of Julie Harris, Brandon deWilde and Ethel Waters. After the couple divorced, Anhalt proved a versatile, consistently effective (and reputedly speedy) scenarist. He penned the adaptation of Irwin Shaw's World War II novel The Young Lions (1958) and Wives and Lovers (1963). The screenwriter earned a second Academy Award for his adaptation of Jean Anouilh's play Becket (1964). Subsequent solo outings included Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), He had box office successes with The Satan Bug (1965) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). Three years later, he scripted the Frank Sinatra vehicle Contract on Cherry Street (NBC) and contributed to the small screen remake of Madame X (NBC, 1981) and the biblically inspired The Day Christ Died (CBS, 1982). Anhalt was also the guiding force behind the 1985 NBC miniseries Peter the Great. Green Ice (1981), and The Neon Empire.