- Born
- Died
- Height5′ 6½″ (1.69 m)
- Harvard graduate Robert Lord studied English literature and playwriting
in George Pierce Baker's renowned
Workshop 47. He subsequently put this training into practice as a story
writer for the New Yorker. Before long, one of his contributions,
The Lucky Horseshoe (1925),
attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and motivated Lord to
relocate to the West Coast. After work on
Tom Mix westerns, he soon landed a
prestige assignment in the shape of the disaster epic
The Johnstown Flood (1926), a
palpable box office success, for which Lord wrote the original story.
His hard-edged style of prose impressed Warner Brothers, who signed him
under contract in 1927.
A favorite of production manager
Hal B. Wallis, Lord remained at the studio
until 1941, by which time he had won an Academy Award for Best Original
Screenplay for
One Way Passage (1932) and been
nominated for another, the controversial social drama
Black Legion (1937), a hard-hitting
indictment of bigotry and mob rule. Lord again wrote the original story
and also served as associate producer. A hit with both critics and
audiences, the picture starred
Humphrey Bogart, who, at the time was
merely another contract player in danger of being typecast as heavies
in run-of-the-mill potboilers. "Black Legion" reaffirmed Bogart's star
qualities and he never forgot the role Robert Lord had played in
rescuing his career.
Following the death of Mark Hellinger in
1947, Bogart went out of his way to procure Lord as vice-president of
his independent Santana Productions. In his new role as Santana's main
producer, Lord was given carte blanche to hire such experienced writers
as Daniel Taradash and
John Monks Jr. (for
Knock on Any Door (1949)). He
was also instrumental in acquiring the rights for suitable literary
material, best of which was
In a Lonely Place (1950), based
on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes. While
Lord was never officially credited with writing any of Santana's
screenplays, he was nonetheless significantly involved in their early
development (as, for example, in defining the character of Dixon
Steele). On the flip side, Lord's friendship with Bogart rather clouded
his objectivity in that he frequently interfered in the creative
process by insisting on editorial revisions (particularly, whenever he
felt the star's character was not portrayed in a sufficiently
sympathetic light).
After Bogart sold his interest in Santana to Columbia in 1955, Lord
effectively retired from the film industry. He died in April 1976 in
Los Angeles at the age of seventy-five.- IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
- SpousesMartha BlissAna May(? - 1975) (her death)
- Child: Evelyn (c. 1928)
- Child: Janet Smith (c. 1932).
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