Philip Ives Dunne (February 11, 1908 – June 2, 1992) was a Hollywood screenwriter, film director and producer, who worked prolifically from 1932 until 1965. He spent the majority of his career at 20th Century Fox. He crafted well regarded romantic and historical dramas, usually adapted from another medium. Dunne was a leading Screen Writers Guild organizer and was politically active during the "Hollywood Blacklist" episode of the 1940s–1950s. He is best known for the films How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Robe (1953) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Dunne received two Academy Award nominations for screenwriting: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and David and Bathsheba (1951). He also received a Golden Globe nomination for his 1965 screen adaptation of Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, as well as several peer awards from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), including the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. Many notable directors worked with Dunne's screenplays, including Carol Reed, John Ford, Jacques Tourneur, Elia Kazan, Otto Preminger, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Michael Curtiz, among others. Biography Early life Dunne was born in New York City, the son of Chicago syndicated columnist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne and Margaret Ives (Abbott) Dunne, an Olympic champion golfer and the daughter of the Chicago Tribunes book reviewer and novelist, Mary Ives Abbott. Although a Roman Catholic, he attended Middlesex School (1920–1925) and Harvard University (1925–1929). Immediately after graduation, he boarded a train for Hollywood for his health and to seek work. First screenplays Dunne was not initially interested in working in the film industry but that was the first place he got a job. Via a recommendation from a friend of his brother he obtained work at Fox as a reader at $35 a week. Also among readers at the time was Leonard Spigelgass. Dunne later recalled: We got nothing but the worst stuff; all the good books and plays went through the New York readers’ department. We got the pathetic originals written by out-of-work screenwriters. I kept seeing ways that I thought I could improve them. I'd write a synopsis, and I'd make it better. I couldn't help it. It would be an obvious thing that the guy had missed. And when you learn to synopsize a story, you learn to construct it. At the same time, I was moonlighting writing short stories,