Hugo Butler

Hugo Dansey Butler (4 May 1914 – 7 January 1968) was a Canadian-American screenwriter. He was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist during the 1950s, and subsequently worked in Mexico and Europe under a variety of pseudonyms, notably in collaboration with directors Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey (a fellow blacklistee) and Robert Aldrich. He had previously been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story for Edison the Man.

Early life and education Butler was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1914 to British-born parents Frank Russell Butler and Margaret Annie Dansey Addis. At the time, his father was working for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Butler's parents divorced sometime after World War I, and his father moved to the United States, where he became a silent film actor and later an Oscar-winning screenwriter. He and his mother moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he'd spend most of his childhood.

Blacklisting Butler and his wife Jean Rouverol had joined the Communist Party in 1943, after being introduced by their friend Waldo Salt, but left before 1947. He fronted for Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo on 1951's The Prowler, directed by Joseph Losey, who himself would later be blacklisted.

Later that year, Butler was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.

Legacy Butler's sole directorial work Los pequeños gigantes was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

Partial filmography Edison the Man (story, 1940) Blossoms in the Dust (1941) A Yank on the Burma Road (1942) Lassie Come Home (1943) The Southerner (1945) Miss Susie Slagle's (1946) From This Day Forward (1946) A Woman of Distinction (1950) He Ran All the Way (1951) The Big Night (1951) The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954) Torero (1956) Autumn Leaves (1956) Los pequeños gigantes (1958) The Young One (1960) The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)