Melville Shavelson

Melville Shavelson honed his comedic writing chops while working as a joke writer on comedian Bob Hope's radio show, and traveled with the comic to Hollywood in the '30s. Many of his early screenwriting credits were Hope's early films, like "The Princess and the Pirate," in which Hope's cowardly actor pretends to be a Gypsy woman in order to escape capture by pirates, and "Sorrowful Jones," where Hope portrayed a flighty gambler who finds himself in charge of a young girl. Shavelson soon turned to directing, and his 1955 debut, the vaudeville biopic "The Seven Little Foys," earned acclaim for both Shavelson's screenplay and Hope's dramatic skills. At the end of the '50s, Shavelson earned another Oscar nomination for the romantic comedy "Houseboat," which starred Sophia Loren as a housemaid who falls in love with Cary Grant, and directed the biopic "The Five Pennies," in which Danny Kaye portrayed noted jazz bandleader Red Nichols. During the '60s Shavelson wrote and directed many of his most famous films, including "Yours, Mine and Ours," which starred Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda as the exasperated but loving parents of a rambunctious 18-child family, and "It Started in Naples," about an uptight lawyer who raises his estranged brother's rebellious son and falls in love with the boy's beautiful mother. A three-time president of the Writers Guild of America, Shavelson also created the highly regarded '70s TV miniseries "Ike," about United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California.