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Budd Schulberg
Hollywood insider … Budd Schulberg. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Getty Images
Hollywood insider … Budd Schulberg. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Getty Images

On the Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg dies aged 95

This article is more than 14 years old
He won an Oscar for the script that spawned the oft-repeated line 'I coulda been a contender', but was shunned for informing on his peers to the House Un-American Activities Committee

Budd Schulberg, whose screenplay for On the Waterfront won an Oscar in 1955 and spawned one of movie history's most quoted lines in "I coulda been a contender", has died aged 95. He died of natural causes at his home in Long Island. "He was very loved and cherished," said his wife Betsy Schulberg.

The son of Paramount chief BP Schulberg, he began his career as a novelist, but the siren call of Hollywood was undeniable. His 1941 book What Makes Sammy Run?, about a hustler who schmoozes and backstabs his way to the top, was considered by many to be the classic insider's guide to the studio system and made him a pariah on the backlots. The Disenchanted (1950) focused on a young screenwriter who collaborates with and is disillusioned by an ailing famous novelist; the latter was widely believed to be based on F Scott Fitzgerald, whom Schulberg encountered while a student at Dartmouth College. Both books were later adapted for the stage.

He was born Budd Wilson Schulberg on 27 March 1914 in New York but grew up in Hollywood, surrounded by silent-film stars and all the accoutrements of the silver-spooned childhood, such as a fancy Lincoln town car complete with gold wicker and carriage lights. "I hated that car so much that when I had to be driven to school in it I would lie on the floor and crawl out a block away so my school mates wouldn't see my shame," he recalled years later.

During the second world war, Schulberg served in the US navy before being assigned to the Office of Stategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA). There, he worked in John Ford's documentary unit, which recorded US combat operations, from D-Day to the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg trials; he was even involved in the arrest of Leni Riefenstahl in Austria.

In 1951, Schulberg was named as a former Communist party member by screenwriter Richard Collins in his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Schulberg, who went on to testify himself, admitted he had been a communist in the 1930s, but said he had become disillusioned after Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. But his most controversial act was to inform on his peers – he named eight other Hollywood figures as fellow travellers, including screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr and director Herbert Biberman, resulting in their being blacklisted.

On the Waterfront, which starred Marlon Brando as a dock worker who lays bare corruption within his union, has often been interpreted as a defence of informing. Released in 1954, it won a total of eight Oscars, including best actor for Brando, best director for Elia Kazan and best writing for Schulberg. Schulberg and Kazan would collaborate again on the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd.

In 2002 he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame for his work as a sportswriter. Among his finer examples in that genre was The Harder They Fall, a celebrated fictionalised exposé of boxing, written in 1947. It was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart eight years later. Schulberg combined his love of boxing and the movies in 2001 when he began working with Spike Lee on a film about boxer Joe Louis – however, this film remains unproduced.

He is survived by his wife, Betsy, and four children.

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