On the Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg dies

Budd Schulberg, the legendary novelist and sports writer who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the Hollywood classic On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando, has died in New York State. He was 95.
 
Schulberg's wife, the actress and magazine journalist Betsy Langman, told the New York Times that her husband died on Wednesday afternoon after collapsing at his home in Westhampton Beach on Long Island. He was taken to a local hospital but doctors were unable to revive him.
 
Born Seymour Wilson Schulberg in 1914 in Harlem, he was the son of Paramount Pictures chief BP Schulberg, a former business partner of Louis B Mayer. But his acclaimed first novel What Makes Sammy Run? exposed the unsavoury side of Hollywood and drew the ire of movie producers when it was published in 1941. The one-time Communist Party member was further ostracised by Hollywood when he voluntarily testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s (pictured).
 
Schulberg was also well-known as a boxing writer, and became the chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated. His 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, a fictionalised expose of prize-fighting, was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1955.
 
But Schulberg's greatest success came with his screenplay for On the Waterfront, the 1954 film which won eight Academy Awards including Oscars for director Elia Kazan and its star Brando, who played a washed-up boxer. Schulberg based his classic story of mob violence and corruption among dockworkers on a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper articles by Malcolm Johnson, but iconic lines such as "I coulda been a contender" were his own.
 
Schulberg, as he liked to tell interviewers, was born into Hollywood royalty and was surrounded by significant figures throughout his long life and six-decade career. The screen legend Rupert Valentino came to his fifth birthday, he went binge-drinking with novelist F Scott Fitzgerald and sparred with Ernest Hemingway. In 1968 he was only metres away from presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy when he was shot dead in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
 
Earlier this year Schulberg flew to London to see Steven Berkoff's West End revival of On the Waterfront at the Haymarket Theatre Royal. The adaptation was well received by the London critics and Schulberg declared its leading man, Simon Merrell, had done "amazingly well, without trying to copy Brando's performance". ·