Celebrity Biographies
Norman Corwin
Norman Corwin was considered one of the great writers of the golden age of American radio. He wrote the programs that reported World War II to the whole country. Although the radio was his great passion for him, he also wrote film scripts. Corwin passed away on October 18, 2011 at his Los Angeles residence of natural causes.
Born May 3, 1910, in Boston (Massachusetts), Norman Lewis Corwin into a Jewish family. Although he was not a rigorous practitioner, Corwin always used many ideas from the Jewish tradition in his works.
He began his career as a journalist for local newspapers before moving to New York in 1938, where he produced his own program, “Words Without Music,” for CBS. His broadcasts are considered radio poems, and they recounted the harsh reality of World War II.
On May 8, 1945, Corwin broadcast the historic ‘On a Note of Triumph’ program about the end of the war and the Allied victory. The circumstances of this broadcast and its consequences on subsequent radio are reconstructed in the documentary A Note of Triump: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin , which includes testimonials from Robert Altman , among others, and which won the Oscar for best short documentary in 2006.
In 1947, Corwin married actress Katherine Locke , with whom he remained together until her death in 1995. They had two children, Anthony Leon -adopted-, and Diane Arlene.
In 1948 he left CBS and began working for United Nations Radio. He combined his work on the airwaves with writing screenplays for the movies, from the drama Always and One Day, about an American who traveled to Great Britain to sell his family’s house. She subsequently wrote Once Upon a Time , which starred Cary Grant , and I’m Not Alone , which starred Jane Wyman and Charles Laughton . Although he is not credited in the credits, he did help out with the script for Vincente Minnelli ‘s Broadway Melodies and John Huston ‘s Moby Dick , which was officially written by Ray Bradbury ..
His most widely recognized film work was The Fool with the Red Hair , again directed by Minnelli (following the dismissal of George Cukor ), and for which Corwin adapted a novel by Irving Stone . The screenwriter obtained one of the four Oscar nominations, which the film monopolized, although the only one who finally won the award was Anthony Quinn , as a secondary.
In his later filmography, The Naked Maja , whose cast was headed by Ava Gardner , and the biblical Ruth’s Story stand out .
Corwin continued to work even at an advanced age. In the 1990s, when he was already in his 80s, he produced a series of plays for National Public Radio.