Peter Viertel, 1920 - 2007.

Peter Viertel went fishing with Ernest Hemingway, fox hunting with John Huston and stepped into the arena with bullfighter Luis Dominguín. For 47 years, the Hollywood beauty Deborah Kerr was at his side. The actress (From Here to Eternity) died in mid-October - now, Peter Viertel has died, too... in a private clinic in Marabella....

[The novelist and screenwriter] worked for such great directors as Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston... From Viertel's pen came the screenplays for such films as African Queen and The Old Man and the Sea.

The German Press Agency.

Updated through 11/8.

See also: a fan site and Wikipedia. In 1992, Janet Maslin reviewed Viertel's Dangerous Friends: At Large With Huston and Hemingway in the 50s for the New York Times.

Online listening tip. Don Swaim's 1992 interview.

Update, 11/8: "Brought up in Santa Monica, California, from the age of six, he spent his early years surrounded by artistic émigrés in and around Hollywood, including Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. "His bisexual mother was also a great friend of Greta Garbo, for whom she co-wrote a number of screenplays.... Among his other accomplishments, Viertel is credited with introducing surfing into Europe."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2007 10:25 AM