Ivan Moffat
Ivan Moffat (February 18, 1918 – July 4, 2002) was a British screenwriter and associate producer who, with Fred Guiol, was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for adapting Edna Ferber's novel Giant into the film Giant.[1]
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[edit] Early life
The son of the British actress and poet Iris Tree and her American husband photographer Curtis Moffat, and the grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree,[2] Ivan Moffat was born in Havana in Cuba in 1918. He was educated at Dartington Hall School in Totnes in Devon, and studied at the London School of Economics. As an undergraduate, he joined the Communist Party, an action for which he was blacklisted for a time while in Hollywood. Jessica Mitford later described Moffat as "span[ning] the gap between Left-wing politics and the deb dance scene".[2] When America entered World War II Moffat enlisted as a writer in the Special Coverage Unit of the US Army Signal Corps, known as the "Hollywood Irregulars". He served under the director George Stevens.[1][2]
Moffat was a friend of Christopher Isherwood, whom he met through his mother, Iris Tree. "In 1946," Isherwood wrote, "Ivan was extremely cute and very like Dirk Bogarde." Isherwood based the leading character in his first draft of Down There on a Visit (1961) on Moffat, though the character later evolved into Isherwood himself. Patrick, in Isherwood's A Meeting by the River (1967), is also partly based on Moffat.[1]
[edit] Film career
Moving to Hollywood after the War, Moffat turned down the offer of a writing job with MGM to become an associate producer at George Stevens's new company, Liberty Films.[2] Amongst other films, Moffat worked on the screenplays for Giant, D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), with Harry Brown, Bhowani Junction (1956), Rossen's They Came to Cordura (1959), Tender Is the Night (1962), The Heroes of Telemark (1965), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and Black Sunday (1977), as well as revising the screenplay for The Great Escape (1963).[2] For George Stevens he served as Associate Producer on the classic movies Shane (1951) and A Place in the Sun (1953).[1]
In the 1970s Moffat wrote episodes for the television series Colditz and in 1985 he wrote the story and co-wrote the script for the television film Florence Nightingale which starred Jaclyn Smith as Nightingale.
[edit] Personal life
Moffat married first Natasha Sorokin, with whom he had one daughter, Lorna Moffat - the marriage was dissolved. Secondly, in 1961 he married The Hon. Katharine Smith, the daughter of The Rt. Hon. The 3rd Viscount Hambleden, and with whom he had two sons, Jonathan (born 1964) and Patrick Moffat (born 1968) - again the marriage was dissolved. Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Anglo-Irish author, revealed on her deathbed that Moffat was the father of her youngest daughter, Ivana Citkowitz (born 1966).
Ivan Moffat is the grandfather of singer songwriter, and actress Georgina Moffat. He died on 4 July 2002, aged 84, in Los Angeles, California, from a stroke.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d Moffat's obituary in The Independent 19 July 2002
- ^ a b c d e Moffat's obituary in The Telegraph August 3, 2002
