Walter bernstein

Born on August 20 into a Jewish family in New York, Walter Bernstein attended Dartmouth College, where he landed his first job as a film critic for the campus newspaper. There, he joined the Young Communist League of the United States. In February 1941 he was drafted into the US Army. He rose to the rank of sergeant and spent most of World War II as a correspondent for the military newspaper Yank, reporting from Iran, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily and Yugoslavia. At the end of the war he wrote several articles about his experiences in “The New Yorker.”

In 1948,  Walter Bernstein moved to Hollywood, where he made his debut as a screenwriter for Blood on Hands , which starred Burt Lancaster . Chapters of successful television series followed, and another feature film, That Kind of Woman, by Sidney Lumet .

Walter Bernstein  was featured in the “Red Channels” publication, where his leftist activism was denounced. As a result, he was blacklisted by Hollywood, making it impossible for him to work. He continued writing in the shadows, using headliners, in titles such as The Magnificent Seven , The Train or Limit Point , also by Lumet. He captured his adventures from this time in the script for The Cover , which starred Woody Allen . For this film he earned an Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay and the Writers Guild Award (WGA) for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.

Already rehabilitated, he wrote titles such as Yankees , The knave and his garment , or The house on Carroll Street . Until his death, he was a contributor to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Dramatic Writing.

Divorced from Marva Spellman, a Yoga teacher,  Walter Bernstein  was together with Barbara Lane and the actress Judith Braun , with whom he had three children. From the late 1980s until his death, he was accompanied by Gloria Loomis.