Dudley Nichols

Nichols came to the movies from newspapers, a serious, principled Ohioan who had served in the Navy in the First World War and then made his name as a New York reporter. When he turned to screenwriting he brought a journalist's economy and a moralist's seriousness, and he found his ideal collaborator in the director John Ford.

Their partnership produced some of the most admired American films of the 1930s. Nichols adapted The Informer, the story of a slow-witted Irishman who betrays a friend for money and is destroyed by guilt, into a stark, expressionistic tragedy that won him the Academy Award for writing. He then wrote the film that reinvented the Western as serious art, Stagecoach, gathering a cross-section of society inside a single careening coach, and continued with the elegiac The Long Voyage Home and the fervent The Fugitive.

Outside his work with Ford he showed remarkable range, co-writing the delirious screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, adapting Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and darkening into the poisonous noir of Scarlet Street. He later directed a handful of films himself, including Sister Kenny and a bold version of Mourning Becomes Electra.

What sealed his place in Hollywood history was an act of conscience. A committed founder and officer of the Screen Writers Guild, Nichols was locked in a bitter struggle with the studios over union recognition, a struggle in which the Academy was seen as management's instrument. So when he won his Oscar for The Informer, he refused to accept it, becoming the first person ever to decline the award and returning the statuette in solidarity with the boycotting guild. He took it only years later, once the fight was won. He kept writing until his death from cancer in 1960, remembered as both a superb craftsman and a man who put his principles above a golden trophy.