Robert Alan Aurthur was an American screenwriter, film director, and film producer. Many of his works examined race relations and featured black actor and director Sidney Portier.
In the early years of television, he wrote for Studio One and then moved on to write episodes of Mister Peepers. He followed with teleplays for Campbell Playhouse, Justice, Goodyear Television Playhouse and Producers' Showcase. One of his four 1951-55 plays for Philco Television Playhouse was the Emmy-nominated A Man Is Ten Feet Tall, with Don Murray and Sidney Poitier, which was adapted two years later as the theatrical film, Edge of the City with Poitier and John Cassavetes. He wrote two teleplays for Playhouse 90. One of them, A Sound of Different Drummers, borrowed so heavily from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 that Bradbury sued. Aurthur appears with Merle Miller in David Susskind's 2012 documentary about President Truman titled Give 'em Hell, Harry, stating, "Going into a Howard Johnson's was bad enough, but with a President!" They discuss George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon, as well as their observations on Truman's respect for Marshall.
Film
After 1957, he continued to write screenplays. He was one of the writers on Spring Reunion, notable as Betty Hutton's final film, following with Warlock, and his earlier association with Cassavetes led to script contributions on the actor's directorial debut with Shadows. After an uncredited contribution to Lilith, he scripted John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix. He wrote and directed The Lost Man about a black militant. As the writer-producer of All That Jazz, he received two posthumous Academy Award nominations.
Theatre
Three plays written by Aurthur were produced on Broadway: A Very Special Baby, Kwamina, and Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights. Kwamina was a collaboration with composer and lyricist Richard Adler, starring Adler's wife Sally Ann Howes; the subject material, an interracial love affair, proved too controversial and the show closed. Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights was directed by Portier and starred African-American stars Louis Gossett Jr. and Cicely Tyson; the plot involved a young Jewish man who insisted on becoming a slave to an African-American law student as a penance for the years of wrongs whites have done to blacks. It closed after seven performances.
Personal life
Aurthur served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. He was the first husband of actress Beatrice Arthur, who also served in the Marines; they divorced in 1950 and had no children. She used a variation of his surname as her professional name. His second wife's name was Virginia; one of their children was Jonathan Aurthur, who committed suicide eight years after his own son's suicide, which he had written a book about. At the time of his death Robert Alan Authur was married to Jane Wetherell Aurthur, a former television producer; they had one daughter, Kate Aurthur, who as of 2020 was an editor at Variety.
