Name Lester Cole | Role Screenwriter | |
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Born June 19, 1904 ( 1904-06-19 ) New York, New York Died August 15, 1985, San Francisco, California, United States Books Hollywood Red, The House of Seven Gables Movies Born Free, Blood on the Sun, High Wall, The Invisible Man Retu, None Shall Escape Similar People Samuel Ornitz, Alvah Bessie, John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Herbert Biberman | ||
Lester Cole (June 19, 1904 – August 15, 1985) was an American screenwriter.
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Biography
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Polish immigrants to the United States, his father was a Marxist garment industry union organiser, and Cole was a dedicated socialist from childhood.
Lester Cole began his career as an actor but soon turned to screenwriting. His first work was If I Had a Million. In 1933, he joined with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to establish the Writers Guild of America.
In 1934, Cole joined the American Communist Party. He became one of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their Communist Party membership. Cole was convicted of Contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and sentenced to twelve months' confinement at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, of which he served ten months.
As a result of his refusal to testify, Cole was blacklisted by studio executives. Between 1932 and 1947, Cole wrote more than forty screenplays that were made into motion pictures. After being blacklisted, just three screenplays were made into films and only after friends Gerald L.C. Copley, Lewis Copley, and J. Redmond Prior, submitted the screenplays under their names.
His best-known screenplay was that for the highly successful Born Free (1966), credited to Gerald L.C. Copley.
In 1981, Cole published his autobiography, entitled Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole. In it, he recounted a 1978 incident when he called into a radio talk show on which ex-Communist Budd Schulberg was a guest. According to Cole, he berated Schulberg (who had testified before HUAC as a friendly witness) on the air as a "canary" and a "stool pigeon" before he was cut off:
About this incident, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry) comments, "Whether this actually happened is uncertain, but one can guess."
Lester Cole died of a heart attack in San Francisco, California, in 1985. Ronald Radosh, Emeritus Professor of History at City University of New York, wrote that Cole "remained a hardcore Communist" until his death.