Robert Anderson
Robert Woodruff Anderson was an American playwright, screenwriter, theatrical producer, and actor who worked primarily in the English language across stage, screen, and television.
Born in Manhattan on April 28, 1917, Anderson was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and subsequently at Harvard University. These formative years preceded a career that extended across multiple disciplines within the performing arts, encompassing work as a playwright, screenwriter, television writer, and television actor, as well as a role as a theatrical producer.
Anderson received two Academy Award nominations for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. The first came for his work on The Nun's Story in 1959, and the second for I Never Sang for My Father in 1970. The latter screenplay was adapted from his own stage play, demonstrating his movement between theatrical and cinematic forms of storytelling. That both nominations recognized work derived from existing source material reflects a consistent engagement with the craft of adaptation alongside his original writing.
Anderson died in Manhattan on February 9, 2009, in the same city where he had been born more than nine decades earlier. His body of work spanned the theater, film, and television, and the presence of his own play as the source material for one of his Academy Award-nominated screenplays underscores a recurring pattern in his career: the translation of dramatic narrative from one medium to another.
Quotes by Robert Anderson
All you’re supposed to do is every once in a while give the boys a little tea and sympathy.
For what constitutes a Christian is not; accepting the Christian’s creed, but accepting Christ as Savior and Lord. It is a question of personal loyalty and love.
Our Southern brethren have done grievously, they have rebelled and have attacked their father’s house and their loyal brothers. They must be punished and brought back, but this necessity breaks my heart.
The Cross was the manifestation of Divine love without reserve or limit; but it was also the expression of man’s unutterable malignity.
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution which it may never find.
Men point to the sad incidents of human life on earth, and they ask "Where is the love of God?" God points to that Cross as the unreserved manifestation of love so inconceivably infinite as to answer every challenge and silence all doubt for ever. And that Cross is not merely the public proof of what God has accomplished; it is the earnest of all that He has promised.
For what constitutes a Christian is not; accepting the Christian's creed, but accepting Christ as Savior and Lord. It is a question of personal loyalty and love.
All of those things are at risk now, so we're trying to preserve a natural treasure really for this area.
I had spent all of that time at sea. And I had a job I didn't care about. ... That was the reason they asked me to go. Everything sort of fit. We shook hands on it that night.