Celebrity Biographies
Andy Lewis
He earned an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay with his brother, Dave Lewis, for “Klute,” directed in 1971 by Alan J. Pakula, for which Jane Fonda won the statuette. Andy Lewis passed away on February 28, 2018, of natural causes, at his residence in Walpole, New Hampshire, at age 92.
Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, on August 5, 1925, Andrew Kittredge Lewis (his full name) was the son of a prominent Harvard philosophy professor. He himself studied Architecture at this university in 1949, after a season serving in the army.
He began working as a screenwriter on Omnibus , a variety television series, for educational purposes. Already then he began to form a tandem with Dave , confined to a wheelchair after contracting encephalitis, during World War II.
After numerous episodes of series of the time, such as The Virginian , Andy Lewis made his film debut with Underground , a forgotten war drama. Its producer, Jules Levy, gave him the idea for Klute , which he again wrote four-handed with David. “We worked by letter and by phone, since he was in California and I was in Massachusetts,” Andy recalled. “I like to think that I was good at writing about intelligent women who fend for themselves.”
Jane Fonda received the script while filming Dance, Damn You Dance , and although she liked the story, she had doubts about whether she should agree to play a leading lady. “I wondered if a true feminist would do that,” recalls the actress. “But I asked my friend Barbara Dane, a singer and activist, who told me that if the character gave me the chance to create a complex character, she should do it. It didn’t matter that she was a whore, as long as she was real herself.”
During the Oscars ceremony, Dave’s wheelchair was borrowed, to be offered to the elderly Charlie Chaplin , who collected the honorary award. Ultimately, the brothers lost to Paddy Chayefsky , author of The Hospital .
Despite the nomination, Andy Lewis only wrote one script again, for the 1974 TV movie Big Rose, Double Trouble . He decided to devote the rest of his life to architecture. In 1959 he signed the book on prefabricated houses “At Home With Tomorrow”, with Carl Koch, a prestigious architect.
He is survived by his six children. “I feel a little afraid of death, because it is something I have not done before. But you have to let me go,” she wrote in a letter to be read at his funeral.