Daniel Taradash, screenwriter: born Louisville, Kentucky 29 January 1913; married Madeleine Forbes (three children); died Los Angeles 22 February 2003.

Daniel Taradash, who won an Oscar in 1953 for his screenplay of From Here to Eternity, was noted for his skilful adaptation of literary and theatrical works. Many had considered From Here to Eternity, with its racy content and criticism of the army, to be unfilmable, but Taradash, a lawyer who never practised law, fashioned a screenplay that satisfied both the military and the censors. His other screenplays included Golden Boy, which made William Holden a star, Rancho Notorious, Desirée, Picnic and Bell, Book and Candle. His sole effort as a director, Storm Center, was the most outspoken attack on McCarthyism to appear in the 1950s.

Born in 1913 in Louisville, Kentucky, Taradash was the only child of a wealthy clothing manufacturer. After attending High School in Miami, he went to Harvard Law School and passed the New York bar examination in 1937. "My father was extremely anxious for me to be a lawyer," he later said, "but I had done some writing at Harvard, and while in law school I wrote a play which I sent to an agent in New York and she indicated there was something there."

He persuaded his father to support him for one more year while he tried to be a writer. During that year he wrote a play which he submitted to a nationwide contest sponsored by the Bureau of New Plays, which was financed by several film studios and which rewarded the finalists with a playwriting course.

The stage and film director Rouben Mamoulian heard about the contest, of which I was one of the winners. He was about to direct Golden Boy at Columbia and came to New York to get Clifford Odets to do the script, but doing the script of his own play held no interest for him. Eve Ettinger, Columbia's New York story editor, told Mamoulian about the course and suggested he look at some of the students' work. Mamoulian liked what Lew Meltzer and I had written. Each of us had to write a few scenes. When Mamoulian read our efforts, he said he could not choose between us, so he hired us both.

The story of a young violinist (Holden) who succumbs to the lure of fast money in the boxing ring until persuaded by a formerly hard-bitten career woman (Barbara Stanwyck) to return to his music, the film's script was described by Taradash as "a structural job and a dialogue job" which stuck close to the play except for its happy ending. "Mamoulian obviously knew that movie audiences did not want Lorna and Joe to die at the end, as they did in the play." Even though the studio head Harry Cohn was noted for his respectful treatment of writers, Taradash returned to New York to pursue his ambition to be a playwright.

When I came back to finish the last three months of my contract, I was punished by being put into Sam Katzman's B-movie unit to work on a film called The Sing Sing Story, which was never made. Columbia didn't pick up my option, so I didn't return to the studio until 1949.

After working on a minor musical at Universal, A Little Bit of Heaven (1941) starring Gloria Jean, Taradash was drafted into the Army, where he wrote a series of training films called Kill or Be Killed. Taradash returned to Columbia when Eve Ettinger asked him to help out on the film Knock on Any Door (1949), which starred Humphrey Bogart as a lawyer defending a young delinquent (John Derek).

Having written several unproduced plays, Taradash eagerly accepted the offer to adapt Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains Sales for the Broadway stage as Red Gloves. A cerebral political melodrama set in a fictional Balkan nation caught between the Nazi threat and the Soviet Union during the years 1943 to 1945, it had been a big hit in Paris but the severely cut version written by Taradash offended Sartre, who repudiated it before the production opened, claiming that it was a distortion of his intentions.

Its star Charles Boyer (who abandoned his toupée for the role) was praised for a superb performance but the play, which opened in December 1948, was not well received and its three-month run was generally credited to the popularity of Boyer. "Red Gloves was a nightmare," said Taradash, who loathed the play's director, Jed Harris. "Charles Boyer was the only ray of hope and light because he was a wonderful actor."

Taradash returned to Hollywood to adapt Charlotte Armstrong's novel Mischief, the tale of a psychopathic baby-sitter. Retitled Don't Bother to Knock (1952), the film gave Marilyn Monroe her first major dramatic role, and was directed by Roy Ward Baker, who later wrote, "Taradash's construction was beautifully crafted and his dialogue short, sharp and effective."

While making the film, Taradash read in Saturday Review a letter about an Oklahoman librarian who had been fired for refusing to remove a controversial book from her library. He suggested to his fellow writer Elik Moll that they collaborate on a script based on the story and offer it to the liberal producer Stanley Kramer, but Taradash was then offered a lucrative deal to script Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952). "I learned more about screenwriting from Fritz Lang than from anyone," he said, "He taught me how to choreograph a script." Taradash blamed the off-beat western's box-office failure on the studio's cutting of 15 minutes from Lang's original version.

The writer's next project, From Here to Eternity (1953) has a screenplay that is a model of literary adaptation. The historian Bernard K. Dick wrote,

By eliminating some characters from James Jones' novel, conflating others, and limiting the narrative focus to five (Warden, Karen, Alma, Prewett and Maggio), Taradash retained the novel's essence while exercising an adaptor's rights with the accidents. For example, despite Fatso's brutal treatment of Maggio in the stockade, Maggio does not die in the novel . . . To build Maggio into a tragic as well as empathetic figure Taradash has Maggio die in a scene that Frank Sinatra played so movingly that he won an Oscar.

Many stories intertwine in the novel, but Taradash concentrated on two – the romance of the commanding officer's wife (Deborah Kerr) with a sergeant (Burt Lancaster) and the affair of bugle-playing private Prewett (Montgomery Clift) with prostitute Lorene (Donna Reed). Dick wrote, "Taradash established the film's rhythm, which director Fred Zinnemann preserved. Taradash did not so much write as compose the script, so that one story balances the other." For his work, Taradash received one of the eight Oscars awarded to the film.

Desirée (1954) was a complete change of pace for the writer, the story of a mistress of Napoleon. An enjoyable soap opera enhanced by the radiant performance of Jean Simmons, it also starred Marlon Brando who, according to Taradash, "just walked through most of the picture like a moose". The writer was happier adapting William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play Picnic (1956). The stage version did not in fact include a picnic, but Taradash did a fine job opening the work out and was happy with the way Joshua Logan staged his material.

Taradash then realised his ambition to direct as well as write, with the long-planned film about the liberal librarian, now called Storm Center (1956). Back in 1952, Irving Reis had been set to direct the film for Stanley Kramer. It was a difficult film to consider at the height of the McCarthy era, but Taradash thought of approaching Mary Pickford to play the leading role:

It ran counter to the entire mood of the country, a picture where we defend a book called A Communist Dream being in a library. Nobody could accuse Mary Pickford of being anti-American. Stanley got in touch with her and we went to Pickfair. I read the entire script to her and she was crazy about it. She came to the studio for fittings and then she backed out – Hedda Hopper had got to her and persuaded her not to do a film made by Stanley Kramer, The Red. So Columbia said forget it, and later Kramer left the studio.

Reactivated with Bette Davis as star ("She was very excited about it and agreed to take less than her normal deal"), the film alas proved more moral tract than good drama. "The McCarthyites didn't have to kick it. Nobody was coming to the theatre anyway. It really had 'message picture' all over it. The only way you can do a message picture is obliquely."

An adaptation of John Van Druten's Broadway comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958) was a moderately amusing tale of a witch (Kim Novak) in Manhattan who loses her powers of sorcery when she falls in love with one of the men she has captivated (James Stewart) but most of Taradash's later work proved frustrating to the writer, a fact he attributes in part to the disappearance of the movie mogul:

An era sort of died with Harry Cohn and people like him. My credits after that are not good. Hawaii (1966) took up a year of my life. I over-researched the picture, and there's no way of doing that book, even in three hours. Morituri (1965) is another sad story. Brando wanted Bernhard Wicki to direct it. Wicki is a darling man, probably a good director in German. But he only spoke enough English to have dinner with. Brando was in complete control.

Castle Keep (1969) was an unorthodox novel that misfired on screen ("They shot the picture in Yugoslavia, which I thought was a mistake") and Alvarez Kelly (1966) starred William Holden, then drinking heavily. "I said to Eddie Dmytryk, who was directing, 'What is the sense of my sweating out this dialogue if you're gonna let Bill Holden ad lib whatever he wants to say?' "

Taradash's last screen credit was the lavish soap opera adapted from Sidney Sheldon's novel The Other Side of Midnight (1977), though in 1980 he wrote a television film, Bogie. Most of his time in later years was given to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and to the Writers' Guild. He was president of the Academy from 1970 to 1973 and was proud for having urged the giving of the Thalberg Award to Ingmar Bergman and to having led a campaign for a special "homecoming" award to Charlie Chaplin.

In 1987 he described his career as "early triumph and later chaos" but he was still writing at that time, preparing a script (never filmed) on the life of the Polish leader Lech Walesa.

Tom Vallance