Biography
Michael Wilson was an American screenwriter who won the 1951 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for A Place in the Sun. Subpoenaed by HUAC in September 1951 he invoked the Fifth Amendment and was blacklisted; the Academy responded by amending its bylaws in 1957 to bar Communists and Fifth-Amendment-invokers from receiving Oscars (a rule directly aimed at him). He moved to Paris in 1951 (with later periods in Mexico) and wrote, uncredited or under pseudonyms, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Salt of the Earth (1954) — the latter the only film made in defiance of the blacklist. He returned to the U.S. in 1965 and died in 1978. His credit on Bridge on the River Kwai was restored in 1985.
