John Collier

Biography

British novelist, poet and occasional screenwriter, John Henry Noyes Collier was best known as the author of macabre or bizarre short stories with trick endings, akin to those of Roald Dahl. The most widely read of these were published under the title "Fancies and Goodnights" in 1951, winning Collier the inaugural International Fantasy Award and an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. Privately educated by his novelist uncle Vincent (though he never subsequently attended college), he became a published, but largely unsuccessful, poet by the age of 20. He authored several novels in the 1930's (including the whimsical "His Monkey Wife"), which established his reputation as being adroit and possessed of a waspish wit. His books found a wider audience in the United States, than in his own country. In 1935, Collier moved to California, under contract to RKO. His first screenwriting assignment was the adaptation of Compton MacKenzie's novel Sylvia Scarlett (1935). With a meandering storyline and basically unsympathetic characters, the film flopped at the box office to the tune of $363,000 and did much to damage Katharine Hepburn's public image at the time. Collier promptly returned to Britain, where he had greater success with his subsequent endeavour, Elephant Boy (1937) for Alexander Korda's London Films. He returned to Hollywood only sporadically during the 1940's and 50's, his most notable contribution being the screenplay for the classic Bette Davis melodrama Deception (1946). He also penned original material for The African Queen (1951), which was not used in the final print. One of his short stories, "The Chaser", had the distinction of being the only episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1959) First Season, not written by either Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson. Other Collier stories were used effectively in "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955) and "Tales of the Unexpected" (1979). His last major film work was, in tandem with Millard Kaufman, The War Lord (1965) -- a medieval Technicolor romance starring Charlton Heston. For most of the decade, Collier laboured on an adaptation of John Milton's "Paradise Lost", which ended up in book form but never made it onto the screen. Collier divided much of his remaining life travelling between England, France and the U.S.. He also lived for a while in Mexico. At the time of his death, in April 1980, he resided in Pacific Palisades, California.