Biography
Charles William Brackett (November 26, 1892 – March 9, 1969) was an American novelist, screenwriter, and film producer who collaborated with Billy Wilder on sixteen films.
Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, Brackett was the son of Mary Emma Corliss and Edgar Truman Brackett, a New York State Senator, lawyer, and banker. His family lineage dated back to Richard Brackett, who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony near present-day Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1629. His maternal great-uncle, George Henry Corliss, created the Centennial Engine that powered the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Brackett graduated from Williams College in 1915 and earned a law degree from Harvard University. During World War I, he served with the Allied Expeditionary Force and received the French Medal of Honor. He contributed regularly to the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Vanity Fair, and served as a drama critic for The New Yorker. He authored five novels: The Counsel of the Ungodly (1920), Week-End (1925), That Last Infirmity (1926), American Colony (1929), and Entirely Surrounded (1934).
Brackett served as president of the Screen Writers Guild from 1938 to 1939 and led the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences between 1949 and 1955. He wrote and/or produced over forty films, including To Each His Own, Ninotchka, The Major and the Minor, The Mating Season (1951), Niagara, The King and I, Ten North Frederick, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, and Blue Denim.
Starting in August 1936, Brackett partnered with Billy Wilder, co-writing classics such as The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard, both of which earned Academy Awards for their screenplays. Brackett described their collaboration: "The thing to do was suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised. In a few days, it would be apt to turn up, slightly changed, as Wilder's idea. Once I got adjusted to that way of working, our lives were simpler."
Their partnership ended in 1950, after which Brackett joined 20th Century-Fox as a screenwriter and producer. His screenplay for Titanic (1953) won him another Academy Award.
In 1958, he received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.
Charles Brackett passed away on March 9, 1969. His diaries, chronicling his screenwriting and social life from 1932 to 1949, were edited by Anthony Slide and published in the book It's the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age.
