Ernest Lehman Biography

Ernest Lehman wrote some of the most successful movies of the 1950s and ’60s, including The King and I, West Side Story, The Sound of Music and North by Northwest. A New Yorker, Lehman graduated from the City College there in 1937, then went to work as a freelance writer and assistant publicist. By the 1940s he was publishing short stories, followed by two novellas, The Comedian and Sweet Smell of Success. Drawn to Hollywood in 1952, Lehman’s first screenplay was for the star-studded Robert Wise movie, Executive Suite (1953). He followed up that hit with 1954’s Sabrina, another box office success that brought Lehman his first Oscar nomination. Over the next two decades he adapted for the screen Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, starring Paul Newman), The King and I (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, starring Liz Taylor) and Hello, Dolly! (1969, starring Barbra Streisand). These days, Lehman is perhaps best remembered for his original screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (1959, starring Cary Grant). By the 1970s, Lehman was pretty much done with screenwriting. He published two novels and worked closely with the Writers Guild of America, and in 2001 he was awarded an honorary Oscar, the only screenwriter to ever receive that honor.