Michael Wilson (writer)

In 1995, Wilson was credited by the academy's board of directors with an Academy Award nomination as a co-writer of Lawrence of Arabia and credited as the winner of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Dramatic Screenplay.

Wilson also completed an unproduced screenplay on December 16, 1976, The Raid On Harper's Ferry, which was an adaptation of Truman J. Nelson's book The Old Man: John Brown at Harper's Ferry (1973). He also apparently wrote unproduced scripts for a movie about the Industrial Workers of the World titled The Wobblies and a movie about the infiltration of the Black Liberation Movement titled Quiet Darkness.

Michael Wilson was awarded Writers Guild of America's Laurel Award in 1975 and was posthumously awarded his second Academy Award in 1984 for The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Wilson continued to write screenplays, including for The Sandpiper (1965), Planet of the Apes (1968), and Che! (1969). His screenplay for Planet of the Apes was based on a novel by Pierre Boulle; only Boulle received screen credit.

Wilson remained in France with his family for nine years, before returning to live in Ojai, California in the United States in 1964.

While blacklisted, Wilson wrote the script for Salt of the Earth (1954), a fictionalized account of a real strike by zinc miners in Grant County, New Mexico. The movie was directed by Herbert Biberman and produced by Paul Jarrico both of whom had also been blacklisted. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

He wrote or collaborated on scripts for Hollywood films without credit or under a pseudonym for much less than his usual fee before being blacklisted, including Carnival Story (1954) (for King Brothers Productions who often used blacklisted writers); They Were So Young (1954); The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), for Otto Preminger; Friendly Persuasion (1956), for William Wyler; The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for Sam Spiegel and David Lean; The Two-Headed Spy (1958); Tempest (1958) and 5 Branded Women (1960) for Dino De Laurentiis; and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for Spiegel and Lean again.

He was a co-winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951), and won an Edgar Award and another Oscar nomination for his script for 5 Fingers (1953).

In 1945 he became a contract writer with Liberty Films, working (uncredited) on such pictures as It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

He did some William Boyd westerns, Border Patrol (1943), Colt Comrades (1943), Bar 20 (1943), and Forty Thieves (1944).

Wilson was credited on The Men in Her Life (1941) with Loretta Young.

Michael Wilson married Zelma Gussin in 1941; the couple had two daughters. Zelma's sister, Sylvia, was married to another blacklisted screenwriter, Paul Jarrico. Michael Wilson died of a heart attack in 1978 in Los Angeles County, California.

Wilson was born and raised Roman Catholic in McAlester, Oklahoma. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936 and did post-graduate fellowship work between 1937 and 1939. He taught English and began his writing career with short stories for magazines. Then, starting in 1941, he wrote or co-wrote 22 screenplays.

Michael Wilson (July 1, 1914 – April 9, 1978) was an American screenwriter.