11 Facts About Calder Willingham

Calder Willingham's career began in controversy with End as a Man, an indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris.

Calder Willingham adapted the book into a play at New York's Actors Studio, where it was an off-Broadway success featuring a young James Dean and introducing actor George Peppard.

Sam Spiegel, one of Hollywood's top producers, commissioned Calder Willingham to adapt the novel to film, his first, retitled The Strange One for Columbia Pictures, which advertised it as "the first picture filmed entirely by a cast and technicians from the Actors Studio".

In 1951, Calder Willingham published Gates of Hell, his lone book of short stories, mostly comic.

Natural Child, Calder Willingham's first New York novel, was a portrait of two young men and two young women living the bohemian lifestyle of the time.

The novels came slower as Calder Willingham became a more prolific screenwriter.

Stanley Kubrick first hired Calder Willingham to adapt Stefan Zweig's novel The Burning Secret, but the project fell through and Kubrick eventually hired Calder Willingham to work on the script of Paths of Glory, of which Jim Thompson had written earlier drafts.

Calder Willingham continued working with Kirk Douglas, the star of Paths of Glory, receiving screen credit for The Vikings, a box-office hit starring Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

Calder Willingham arranged the deal and wrote the first drafts, before giving way to Nabokov, who'd never written a screenplay but contributed significantly and profited financially.

Calder Willingham stopped working and regained his health, reading and reflecting during a decade of philosophical and spiritual re-evaluation.

Calder Willingham re-emerged in 1989 to do movie work again, his first assignment, adapting one of his own novels directly to the screen.