Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, was born on May 4, 1914 in Calgary,
Alberta, the son of a silent movie actor and screenwriter. Butler
worked as a journalist and playwright before moving to Hollywood in
1937, where he established himself as a screenwriter. In 1940, he
married actress and screenwriter
Jean Rouverol. The next year, he was
nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for
Der große Edison (1940) along with
future Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Dore Schary.
(Schary, a well-known liberal, was one of the few top movie industry
executives who objected to the imposition of the blacklist at the 1947
Waldorf Conference, which he attended as R.K.O.'s executive vice
president in charge of production). His career was temporarily
interrupted by military service in World War II, then permanently
disrupted when he was blacklisted as a subversive after the war.
Butler and his wife moved to Mexico with Hollywood 10 member (and
fellow blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, with
whom Butler pseudonymously collaborated on the screenplay for
Steckbrief 7-73 (1951), a
film noir that was John Garfield'
s last film. (Garfield died of a heart attack soon after being grilled
by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
In Mexico, Butler wrote for the directors
Luis Buñuel and
Carlos Velo. Butler and his wife did not
return to the United States on a permanent basis until the 1960s.
Hugo Butler suffered from arteriosclerotic brain disease. He died from
a heart attack on January 7, 1968 in Hollywood, California at the age
of 53. The last film for which he was credited,
Robert Aldrich's potboiler
Große Lüge Lylah Clare (1968)
was released later that year.
In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted
to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.
