Ted Allan

Ted Allan (January 26, 1916 – June 29, 1995) was a Jewish Canadian writer, several of whose books were made into motion pictures. Ted Allan was born in Montreal as Alan Herman. In the early 1930s returning he worked as a Montreal-based journalist for the Communist Party of Canada's newspaper, The Clarion. He adopted the name Ted Allan so that he could infiltrate a fascist organization and write an exposé, and subsequently kept the pseudonym. In 1936, he met and became friends with Norman Bethune. The next year, Allan joined the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion to fight against fascism in Spanish Civil War and met up with Bethune again. 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 revolution. After an arduous production, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, based on a screenplay by Allan, was released in 1990 to almost universal critical disdain. In 1939 he published This Time a Better Earth about the Spanish Civil War (New York 1939.) Allan left the Labor-Progressive Party, as it was known at the time, in 1957 when the party split following a party crisis fomented by Khrushchev's Secret Speech, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and revelations of state supported anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. In 1976, Allan received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for his story that became the screenplay for the movie Lies My Father Told Me. In 1984 he co-wrote the script for John Cassavetes’s Love Streams, which was based on one of his (Allan’s) plays. The film won the Golden Bear Award at Berlin Film Festival. His daughter, Julie, is a producer (To Walk with Lions). He won the Stephen Leacock Award in 1985 for Love Is a Long Shot. He also published the children's book Willie the Squowse, and published short stories in Harper's and The New Yorker.