Lester Cole

Lester Cole (June 19, 1904 - August 15, 1985) was an American screenwriter.

Born in New York City, Lester Cole began his career as an actor but soon turned to screenwriting. His first work was "If I had a Million." In 1933, he joined with John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz to establish the Writers Guild of America.

In 1934, Cole joined the American Communist Party. He became one of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their Communist Party membership. Cole was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 and sentenced to twelve months confinement at the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, of which he served ten months.

As a result of his refusal to testify, Cole was blacklisted. Between 1932 and 1947 Cole wrote more than forty screenplays that were made into motion pictures. After his blacklisting, just three screenplays were made into films, only after friends, and wife Gerald L.C. Copley, Lewis Copley, and J. Redmond Prior, submitted the screenplays under their names.

His best-known screenplay was that for the highly successful 1966 film Born Free (credited to Gerald L.C. Copley).

In 1981, Cole published his autobiography, entitled Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole. In it he recounted a 1978 incident when he called in to a radio talk show on which ex-Communist Budd Schulberg was a guest. According to Cole, he berated Schulberg (who had testified before HUAC as a friendly witness) on the air as a "canary" and a "stool pigeon" before he was cut off:

About this incident, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley comments, "Whether this actually happened is uncertain, but one can guess."

Lester Cole died of a heart attack in San Francisco, California in 1985. Ronald Radosh, emeritus professor of history at City University of New York, wrote that Cole "remained a hardcore Communist" until his death.