Ted Allan


Alan Herman, known professionally as Ted Allan, was a Canadian screenwriter, author, and poet, several of whose books were made into motion pictures. In 1975, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Writing and won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film for the film Lies My Father Told Me.

Biography

Ted Allan was born in Montreal as Alan Herman.
In 1934 he met and became friends with Norman Bethune. In February 1937 Allan joined Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades to fight against fascism in Spanish Civil War. At the direction of the Brigade, Ted worked as a reporter—he broadcast to America from Madrid—and worked again with Bethune. In 1939 he published his first novel, This Time a Better Earth, drawing on his experiences in the War.
In 1952, Allan and Sydney Gordon published Bethune's biography, The Scalpel, The Sword. Allan battled for nearly 40 years to make a movie about the Canadian surgeon who became a larger-than-life hero of the Chinese Communist Revolution. The film, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, for which Allan wrote the screenplay, was the first official Chinese co-production, shooting in China, Montreal and Spain was released in 1990. It starred Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren.
Allan co-wrote the script for John Cassavetes's celebrated movie Love Streams, which won the Golden Bear Award at Berlin International Film Festival. The film was based on one of Allan's plays, I've Seen You Cut Lemons, which was directed by Sean Connery at the Fortune Theatre in London in 1969.
Allan won the Stephen Leacock Award in 1985 for his novel Love Is a Long Shot.
He died of respiratory failure on June 29, 1995 at the age of 79. He is the subject of the 2002 National Film Board documentary Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the Twentieth Century.

Work

Ted Allan's credits include:

Plays

  • The Ghost Writers retitled The Money Makers
  • Double Image with Roger MacDougal reworked, with Gabriel Arout, as Gog et Magog
  • Double Image
  • Legend of Pepito
  • The Secret of the World
  • I've Seen You Cut Lemons
  • My Sister's Keeper
  • Love Streams
  • The Third Day Comes
  • Willie the Squowse
  • ''Chu Chem''

    Films

  • Lies My Father Told Me
  • Love Streams
  • ''Bethune: The Making of a Hero''

    Books

  • This Time a Better Earth
  • The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune with Sydney Gorden
  • Willie the Squowse
  • Love is a Long Shot
  • Don't You Know Anybody Else
He also published short stories in Harper's, The New Yorker, and other magazines.