- Frances Chaney was blacklisted from TV. She was scheduled to play in "Marty" and was replaced.
- Won an Academy Award for M*A*S*H (1970), when, ironically, very little of his original script "made it" into the film.
- Katharine Hepburn refused to tell MGM boss Louis B. Mayer who wrote Woman of the Year (1942) despite the fact that Mayer liked the script and was eager to purchase it. Only after Mayer signed an agreement purchasing the script which included a fee of $100,000 for the co-authors did Hepburn reveal it was written by two relative unknowns, Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin. Hepburn was afraid if Mayer knew who actually wrote the screenplay he might low ball the authors because both had little clout as of then in Hollywood.
- Close friend and collaborator of Ian McLellan Hunter
- Met his first wife when they both worked for David O. Selznick.
- He had 2 children with his first wife, Sylvia: son, Peter (born in 1939), and daughter, Barbara (born in 1940). He also had a son, James, with his second wife, Frances.
- Spent time in a federal prison for refusing to answer when the House Un-American Activities Committee asked if he was a member of the Communist Party. He had ceased using a pseudonym by the time he wrote the screenplay for M*A*S*H (1970) in 1970.
- Blacklisted in 1950's; one of the Hollywood Ten.
- Son of Ring Lardner
- Uncle of Kate Lardner. Is also her stepfather, after marrying her mother, Frances Chaney, his sister-in-law, after the death of Kate's father, David Lardner.
- His ashes were sprinkled into the Atlantic Ocean.
- In the episode from the second season of The West Wing entitled "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail", Sam Seaborn, while attempting to gain a pardon for someone whom he believes had been falsely convicted of communist espionage in the 1950s, comments to an FBI agent "Ring Lardner's just died. How many years does he get back?".
- Brother of John Lardner, David Lardner and James Lardner.
- Cousin of Rex Lardner.
- Started his career as a reporter at the "New York Daily Mirror" with Ian McLellan Hunter.
- He was the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten.
- Although his political involvement upset the owners of the film studios, he continued to be employed and in 1947 became one of the highest paid scriptwriters in Hollywood when he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox at $2,000 a week (equivalent to $24,271 a week today).
- He was the son of Ellis (Abbott) and journalist and humorist Ring Lardner.
- According to Hungarian writer Miklós Vámos-who visited Lardner several times before his death-Lardner won an Academy Award for a movie he wrote under a pseudonym. Lardner refused to tell which movie it was, saying that it would be unfair to reveal it because the writer who allowed him to use his name as a front (as Lardner's pseudonym) was doing him a big favor at the time.
- Lardner joined the US Communist Party in 1937.
- The blacklist was lifted for Lardner when producer Martin Ransohoff and director Norman Jewison gave him screen credit for writing The Cincinnati Kid (1965).
- Lardner held strong left-wing views, and in the 1930s helped to raise funds for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. He was also involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations.
- Lardner married Silvia Schulman, then David O. Selznick's secretary, in 1937. They had two children, a son and a daughter, and divorced in 1945.
- In an episode of NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, an elderly man is discovered in the studio. When asked his name, he replies first "Bessie Bibermann", then "Scott Trumbo", then "Cole Lardner". All six names are last names of members of the Hollywood Ten.
- His final film project was an adaptation of Roger Kahn's book The Boys of Summer.
- Lardner worked on the scripts for the films Laura (1944), Brotherhood of Man (1946),[3][4][5][6] Forever Amber (1947), and M*A*S*H (1970). The script of the latter earned him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
- In 1946, in Las Vegas, Nevada, Lardner married Frances Chaney, an actress, and they remained wed until his death in 2000. They had one son. Chaney had been married to Lardner's brother, David, until his death in 1944 and had two children, a daughter and a son, from that marriage.
- Lardner appeared before the HUAC on October 30, 1947, but like Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Samuel Ornitz and John Howard Lawson, he refused to answer any questions. Known as the "Hollywood Ten", they claimed that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly gave them the right to do this. HUAC and the courts during appeals disagreed[7] and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress. Lardner was sentenced to 12 months in the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury and fined $1,000. He had been dismissed by Fox on October 28, 1947.
- Beginning in 1955, Lardner and fellow blacklistee Ian McLellan Hunter, working under pseudonyms, wrote episodes of television series, including The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, and The Buccaneers, for producer Hannah Weinstein, an expatriate American living in England. For several years, meetings there with the producer were attended exclusively by Hunter, who had managed to gain a passport despite his political activities, whereas travel abroad for Lardner was deemed "not in the best interest of the United States" by the Passport Bureau, a restriction lasting from 1951 to 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that passports could not be denied for political reasons.
- His later work included M*A*S*H (1970), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and The Greatest (1977), for which he re-wrote the original script by Bill Gunn.
- His brother, James Lardner, was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and was killed in action in Spain in 1938.
- Lardner moved to Hollywood where he worked as a publicist and script doctor before going on to write his own material. This included Woman of the Year (1942), a film that won him and Michael Kanin the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award.
- In his sophomore year he enrolled at the Anglo-American Institute of the University of Moscow. Lardner returned to New York and, in 1935, briefly worked at the Daily Mirror before signing on as publicity director with David O. Selznick's new movie company.
- The episode of Robin Hood first broadcast by the BBC on December 1, 2007, was called "Lardner's Ring".
- He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Princeton University, where he joined the Socialist Club.
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