Allan, Ted, 1916-1995 : Ted Allan was born Alan Herman in Montreal, Quebec on January 25, 1916. During his youth, he attended Baron Byng High School. He began his writing career as a journalist, contributing to the Communist "Toronto Daily Worker" as its Montreal correspondent. At the age of 20, influenced by Dr. Norman Bethune who had encouraged him in his writing, he went to Spain as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War for the Federated Press, and joined Bethune and his staff, Hazen Sise, Henning Sorenson and Allen May, in Madrid. Allan later co-wrote with Sydney Gordon what remains the best-known biography of Norman Bethune, "The Scalpel, the Sword", published in 1955.
Returning to North America, Allan first tried to establish a career as a writer in the United States. He married Kate Lenthier, the widow of a fallen comrade in Spain, and they had two children. He worked as a writer with the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II and tried to break into the film industry as a scriptwriter. Finding it difficult to make a living in the United States, as a writer with Communist sympathies during McCarthyism, Allan returned to his hometown of Montreal and found work writing scripts for CBC radio, including ones for the educational series, "Life With the Robinsons" and "What Makes You Sick", and a series on folk stories, "Tales That People Tell".
In 1954, Allan and his family moved to London, England, where he quickly established a reputation as a playwright, writing for both the stage and television. His television scripts included ones for Canadian actor Bernard Braden's British television show "Early to Braden", and "The Good Son" which was produced on the celebrated Armchair Theatre series in 1969. Allan's first stage play, "The Money Makers", had been produced at Toronto's Jupiter Theatre in 1952 and on CBC's Television Theatre series (starring Kate Reid and Lorne Greene, for whom Allan had earlier written radio scripts), and it was produced again in London at the Arts Theatre in 1955, under the title, "The Ghost Writers". In 1957, Allan co-authored a mystery with playwright Roger MacDougall, "Double Image", which was produced in London by Sir Laurence Olivier at the Savoy Theatre, starring Richard Attenborough, and which had a very successful run in Paris as "Gog et Magog". It was also produced in 1958 at the Crest Theatre in Toronto, with Donald Davis in the lead. In 1964, Allan wrote the original scenario for, "Oh, What a Lovely War!" for the well-known British director Joan Littlewood. Sean Connery directed Allan's "I've Seen You Cut Lemons" in London, 1969, and John Cassavetes produced his "Love Streams", starring Jon Voight and Gina Rowlands, in Los Angeles in 1984. His musical "Chu Chem" had a six month Broadway run.
Allan also wrote several screenplays. He wrote the script for "Sept fois par jour" (1971) directed by Quebec filmmaker Denis Héroux in an Israeli-Canadian co-production. His original screenplay for the Canadian film "Lies My Father Told Me", about growing up in a Jewish family in Montreal, won an Academy Award Nomination, and the film won a Golden Globe Award for the Best Foreign Film, 1976. He worked as a scriptwriter on Barbra Streisand's "Yentl" film project and co-authored the screenplay for John Cassavetes' "Lovestreams", which won the Berlin Golden Bear Award for Best Film 1983. His last film was "Bethune: the Making of a Hero", directed by Philip Borsos and starring Donald Sutherland and released in 1991.
Allan is the author of three novels, "This Time a Better Earth" (1939), "Quest for Pajaro" (1957), which was published under the nom-de-plume Edward Maxwell, and "Love is a Long Shot" (1984), which won the Stephen Leacock award for humour. He is also the author of many short stories, some first published in "The New Yorker" and "Harper's" and later collected and published in "Don't You Know Anybody Else?". His children's book, "Willie the Squowse", which began as a radio play and was produced as a stage play by Toronto's Young People's Theatre in 1987, has been translated into many languages.
In the early 1980s, Allan settled in Toronto, although he continued to divide his time between England, Canada and the United States as he had been doing for the previous decade. He received the Margaret Collier Life Achievement Award from ACTRA for his significant contributions to the international profile of Canadian television in 1990. He died in Toronto on June 29, 1995. Married twice and divorced twice, he left two children, one of whom is the film producer, Julie Allan.
