ONE OF Hollywood's most colourful and prolific screenwriters, Philip Yordan crafted such varied and distinctive fare as Dillinger, Johnny Guitar, The Man from Laramie, The Big Combo and King of Kings. Philip Yordan, screenwriter: born Chicago 1 April 1914; four times married (five children); died La Jolla, California 24 March 2003 One of Hollywood's most colourful and prolific screenwriters, Philip Yordan crafted such varied and distinctive fare as Dillinger, Johnny Guitar, The Man from Laramie, The Big Combo and King of Kings.He won an Oscar for the story of Broken Lance and acted as a front for blacklisted writers during the McCarthy era – of the famed Hollywood Ten who were jailed for their refusal to testify, eight were writers. During the height of the blacklist, Yordan lived in Paris, where he employed a stable of political ?gr?who worked from the basement of his home. One of them, Bernard Gordon, said that though some might have felt exploited, Yordan was well liked. "He had a way of not putting himself above the writer and of being not so much friendly as equal and decent and regular with people."Born in 1914 to Polish immigrants, Yordan was raised in what he later described as a "middle-class Jewish neighbourhood in Chicago". "Life was hard for many during the Depression," he said, "but it didn't affect us, because my dad got into the beauty supply business and that was excellent, because any girl that could raise 75 cents would, to get her hair set." He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and a law degree at Kent College of Law in Chicago, but joined the local Goodman Theatre as an actor and writer. He told Pat McGilligan, author of the 1991 book Backstory 2, I enjoyed reading, and thought that I would write because I hated the idea of a job, of having to go down to an office.

The magazine Esquire rejected some short stories with the comment, "Your prose is stilted, but your dialogue is excellent. What don't you try writing plays?"In 1941 Yordan's first play, Any Day Now, was staged at a small off-Broadway theatre. The director William Dieterle saw the play, and asked Yordan to join him in Hollywood, where he was preparing a film on the history of jazz. Yordan did some uncredited work on Dieterle's All That Money Can Buy (1941) prior to co-writing the jazz film Syncopation (1942) "It was quite dreadful. Dieterle had one of these intellectual concepts that combined the rise of modern architecture with the rise of jazz.

It made absolutely no sense."Moving to the minor studio Monogram, Yordan began to establish a reputation with a series of tightly constructed B movies including the suspense tale The Unknown Guest (1943), an amusing farce, Johnny Doesn't Live Here Any More (1944), starring the French actress Simone Simon ("I lived with her for about a year and a half"), and an impressive early example of film noir, When Strangers Marry (1944). Described by the historian Don Miller as "the finest B film ever made", When Strangers Marry was an early example of Yordan's habit of finding "surrogates" to write a first-draft script. He gave his outline of a murder plot to a bookstore clerk and aspiring novelist, Dennis Miller, who wrote a draft that Yordan revised, the two men sharing screen credit.In 1944 Yordan had a hit on Broadway with his play Anna Lucasta, a work strongly influenced by Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Originally conceived by Yordan as the story of a Polish-American family living in Pennsylvania, it was initially rejected by Broadway producers and Yordan allowed his agent to show it to the Negro Theatre of Harlem, where the playwright- director Harry Wagstaff Gribble helped rewrite it for black actors. The result was a hit that ran on Broadway for nearly three years and was filmed twice, in 1949 starring Paulette Goddard, and in 1958 with an all-black cast including Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jnr.Yordan won an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for Dillinger (1945), a fanciful account of the gangster's life. The following year he wrote the film that had the biggest budget of any Monogram production, Suspense, and the film which gave Ava Gardner her first major screen role, Whistle Stop.House of Strangers (1949) was one of Yordan's contentious credits. The story of a ruthless Italian- American financier (Edward G.