James Dalton Trumbo ( December 9, 1905 – September 10, 1976 ) was an American screenwriter and novelist.

Trumbo won two Academy Awards while blacklisted ; one was originally given to a front writer, and one was awarded to " Robert Rich ," Trumbo's pseudonym.

Trumbo was publicly given credit for two blockbuster films: Otto Preminger made public that Trumbo wrote the screenplay for the smash hit, Exodus, and Kirk Douglas publicly announced that Trumbo was the screenwriter of Spartacus.

Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado, the son of Maud ( née Tillery ) and Orus Bonham Trumbo, and his family moved to Grand Junction in 1908.

He was proud of his paternal ancestor, a Franco-Swiss immigrant Jacob Trumbo ( likely anglicized spelling ), who settled in the colony of Virginia in 1736.

It was inspired by an article Trumbo read several years earlier, concerning the Prince of Wales hospital visit to a Canadian soldier who had lost all his limbs in World War I.

Trumbo was a member of the Communist Party USA from 1943 until 1948.

Trumbo, along with nine other writers and directors, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) as an unfriendly witness to testify on the presence of communist influence in Hollywood.

Trumbo said in a speech given in 1970 that there was blame on all sides:

With the support of Otto Preminger, Trumbo was credited for his screenplay for the 1960 film Exodus, adapted from the novel by Leon Uris.

In 1993, Trumbo was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for writing Roman Holiday ( 1953 ).

A documentary about Dalton Trumbo called Trumbo was produced in 2007 incorporating elements of the play as well as footage of Dalton Trumbo and a panoply of interviews.

The former — whose screenplay was written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, disguised by a front — features a bank holdup sequence shown in an unbroken take over three minutes long that proved widely influential.

On Exodus ( 1960 ) Preminger struck the first major blow against the Hollywood blacklist by openly hiring banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was credited under his own name for the first time in a decade.

On December 19, 2011, The Writers Guild of America announced that Trumbo will get full credit for his work on the screenplay of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, sixty years after the fact.

F. Hugh Herbert was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Comedy but lost to Ian McLellan Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and John Dighton for Roman Holiday.

The FEC yard and station on Trumbo Point in Key West circa 1930.

* 1953 Roman Holiday-Dalton Trumbo ( Note: The screen credit and award was originally credited to Ian McLellan Hunter, who was a front for Trumbo.

* 1956 The Brave One-Robert Rich ( aka Dalton Trumbo ) ( Note: The name of the writer credited with authorship, Robert Rich, turned out to be an alias for Mr. Trumbo, who was being blacklisted at that time.

The screenplay by Dalton Trumbo ( credited to Millard Kaufman because of the Hollywood Blacklist ), and MacKinlay Kantor was based upon a short story by Kantor published in 1940 in The Saturday Evening Post.

The screenplay was credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman ; however, Kaufman was a front for Hollywood Ten outcast Dalton Trumbo, who considerably reworked the story into a doomed love affair.

* Dalton Trumbo for Roman Holiday ( credited to Ian McLellan Hunter ).

His son Christopher Trumbo wrote a play based on his letters during the period of the blacklist, entitled Red, White and Blacklisted ( 2003 ), produced in New York in 2003.

Cleo Trumbo died of natural causes at the age of 93 on October 9, 2009, in the Bay Area city of Los Altos.

They had three children: the filmmaker and screenwriter Christopher Trumbo, who became an expert on the Hollywood blacklist ; Melissa, known as Mitzi, a photographer ; and Nikola Trumbo, a psychotherapist.

In 2003, Christopher Trumbo mounted a Broadway play based on his father's letters called Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, in which a wide variety of actors played his father during the run, including Nathan Lane, Tim Robbins, Brian Dennehy, Ed Harris, Chris Cooper and Gore Vidal.

Dalton Trumbo died in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of 70 on September 10, 1976.

* Trumbo, a 2007 documentary by Peter Askin based on Christopher Trumbo's stage play

It was written by John Dighton and Dalton Trumbo, though with Trumbo on the Hollywood blacklist, he did not receive a credit ; instead, Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for him.

Lardner appeared before the HUAC on October 30, 1947, but like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and John Howard Lawson, he refused to answer any questions.

* Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, receives full screenwriting credit for his work on the films Exodus and Spartacus released this year.

Scortia also collaborated with Dalton Trumbo on the novel The Endangered Species.

It was initially pressed into Army use after the Pearl Harbor bombing, and then later during World War II by the Navy as an adjunct runway to the Trumbo Point Seaplane Base and the main Naval Air Station for fixed-wing and lighter-than-air ( i. e., blimp ) aircraft on Boca Chica Key.

In 1961, the movie version of his second novel, The Brave Cowboy, with screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, was being shot on location in New Mexico by Kirk Douglas who had bought the novel's screen rights and was producing and starring in the film, released in 1962 as Lonely Are the Brave.

Dalton Trumbo was the screenwriter, and Charrière himself acted as consultant on location.

It contained the first industry names on what later became the infamous Hollywood Blacklist — Dalton Trumbo, Maurice Rapf, Lester Cole, Howard Koch, Harold Buchman, John Wexley, Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Salemson, Henry Meyers, Theodore Strauss and John Howard Lawson.

In 1971, she would appear in a movie written by fellow blacklist member, Dalton Trumbo ( whom Kirk Douglas had gotten back on the screen with Spartacus ), in the movie Johnny Got His Gun, playing the mother of Timothy Bottoms.

In March 2009, Redgrave returned to the London stage playing the title role in Trumbo, based on the life of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

Trumbo graduated from Grand Junction High School.

Trumbo got his professional start working for Vogue magazine.

Trumbo aligned himself with the Communist Party USA before the 1940s, although he did not join the party until 1943.

In 1941, Trumbo wrote a novel The Remarkable Andrew, in which, in one scene, the ghost of Andrew Jackson appears in order to caution the United States not to get involved in the war.

Shortly after the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Trumbo and his publisher decided to suspend reprinting of Johnny Got His Gun until the end of the war.

During the war, Trumbo received letters from individuals " denouncing Jews " and using Johnny to support their arguments for " an immediate negotiated peace " with Nazi Germany ; Trumbo reported these correspondents to the FBI.

The scholar Kenneth Billingsley found that Trumbo wrote The Daily Worker about films which he said communist influence in Hollywood had prevented from being made: among them were proposed adaptations of Arthur Koestler's anti-totalitarian works Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar, which described the rise of communism in Russia.

Trumbo and the other nine refused to give information.

After Trumbo and the others were blacklisted, some Hollywood actors and directors, such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets, agreed to testify and to provide names of fellow communist party members to Congress.

After completing his sentence, Trumbo could not get work in California, so he sold his ranch and his family moved to Mexico City with Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol, who had also been blacklisted.