Marguerite Roberts

Marguerite Roberts (September 21, 1905 – February 17, 1989) was an American screenwriter, one of the highest paid in the 1930s. After she and her husband John Sanford refused to testify in 1951 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, she was blacklisted for nine years and unable to get work in Hollywood. She was hired again in 1962 by Columbia Pictures.
Biography
Roberts was born in 1905 in Clarks, Nebraska.
In the early 1920s, Roberts and her first husband traveled in the South selling imitation pearls. In California when their business failed, she found work at an El Centro local newspaper, The Imperial Valley Press. She moved to Hollywood and became a secretary for 20th Century Fox in 1926, and sold her first script in 1931. In 1933, she collaborated on the screenplay of Sailor's Luck, directed by Raoul Walsh. That year she signed the first of a string of contracts with MGM, which made her one of the best paid screenwriters of Hollywood at $2500 per week. She explained how she preferred to write scenarios for tough men: "I was weaned on stories about gunfighters and their doings, and I know all the lingo too. My grandfather came West as far as Colorado by covered wagon. He was a sheriff in the state's wildest days."
Roberts was working for Paramount Pictures in 1936, where she met the writer John Sanford. They married two years later. After Sanford joined the Communist Party in 1939, Roberts followed him but left in 1947. She encouraged him to pursue his independent writing and supported them both by her screenwriting.
Blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee, Roberts had to wait nine years before working again in Hollywood. In 1957 she and Sanford moved to Montecito, California.
In 1962, she was hired by Columbia Pictures to work on Diamond Head (1963). She also wrote the screenplay for True Grit (1969), which earned its actor, John Wayne, his only Oscar. She wrote steadily through the next decade and had many of her films produced.
She died on February 17, 1989, at 83 years old from arteriosclerosis.
Filmography
1933 Sailor's Luck
1933 Jimmy and Sally
1934 Peck's Bad Boy
1935 College Scandal
1935 Men Without Names
1935 The Last Outpost
1936 Rose Bowl
1936 Forgotten Faces
1936 Florida Special
1936 Hollywood Boulevard
1937 Wild Money (uncredited)
1937 Turn Off the Moon
1938 Meet the Girls
1939 They Shall Have Music (uncredited)
1940 Escape
1941 Ziegfeld Girl
1941 Honky Tonk
1942 Somewhere I'll Find You
1944 Dragon Seed
1946 Undercurrent (uncredited)
1947 Desire Me
1947 The Sea of Grass
1948 If Winter Comes
1949 The Bribe
1950 Ambush
1951 Soldiers Three
1952 Ivanhoe (credit restored)
1953 The Girl Who Had Everything (uncredited)
1962 The Main Attraction (uncredited)
1962 Diamond Head
1963 Rampage
1965 Love Has Many Faces
1968 5 Card Stud
1969 True Grit
1970 Norwood
1971 Red Sky at Morning
1971 Shoot Out
References
External links
1905 births
1989 deaths
American women screenwriters
Hollywood blacklist
Victims of McCarthyism
People from Greeley, Colorado
Burials at Santa Barbara Cemetery
20th-century American women writers
20th-century American writers
20th-century American screenwriters