Stewart Stern, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter who wrote “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Rachel, Rachel” and other acclaimed films before forsaking Hollywood three decades ago, died on Monday in Seattle. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by John Jacobsen, a friend and colleague.
Mr. Stern’s screenplays were praised by critics for their psychological depth — an attribute, he said, that stemmed from his own turbulent inner life. Drawing on that interior landscape let him write as he did, he said, but its very presence eventually made writing impossible.
With a co-author, Alfred Hayes, Mr. Stern received an Oscar nomination for his first film, the 1951 drama “Teresa.” (The two men were nominated for their joint work on the film’s original story, which was the basis for Mr. Stern’s screenplay.)
Directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring John Ericson and Pier Angeli, “Teresa” told the story of an American G.I. who returns home with his Italian war bride, and his painful adjustment to civilian life. For the screenplay, Mr. Stern drew deeply on his own combat experience in World War II, for which he received a Bronze Star.
Mr. Stern was also nominated for an Oscar for “Rachel, Rachel,” the 1968 drama starring Joanne Woodward and directed by her husband, Paul Newman. His screenplay, an adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s 1966 novel, “A Jest of God,” centered on the yearnings of a lonely schoolteacher.
Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Renata Adler called it “a little sappy at moments, but the best written, most seriously acted American movie in a long time.”
For television, Mr. Stern adapted “The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, into a 1973 broadcast starring Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles and Michael Moriarty. He won an Emmy Award for his adaptation of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book “Sybil,” about a woman with multiple-personality disorder, into a 1976 mini-series starring Sally Field.
But Mr. Stern was almost certainly best known for “Rebel Without a Cause,” released in 1955. A searing story of adolescent disaffection, the film, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Dean, is considered one of the foremost of its era. Dean died at 24 in a car crash shortly before it opened.
In creating the screenplay, which was based on Irving Shulman’s adaptation of a story by Ray, Mr. Stern looked to his own disaffected youth. As he explained afterward, he based Dean’s character, Jim Stark, on his young self and modeled Jim’s parents — unnaturally detached and seemingly incapable of love — on his own.
Stewart Stern was born in New York City on March 22, 1922, and reared in Manhattan. As a child, he spent many vacations at the vast Rockland County estate of Adolph Zukor, an uncle by marriage who was a founder of Paramount Pictures; fellow guests might include Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin.
“We lived in the shadow of our rich relations,” Mr. Stern told The Seattle Times in 1996. “My mother was intent on keeping up with the people she was raised with, which was impossible. My father was a physician who wanted to be a rabbi but was weighed down by a great sense of obligation to support his family in style.”
Mr. Stern said that he “felt the depression in our household, and thought it must be my fault,” and added, “There was no demonstration of love I could read as a little boy.”
As an infantryman during the war, Mr. Stern fought at the Battle of the Bulge, in which some 500 members of his battalion died. Afterward, he made his way to Hollywood, where he began his career as a dialogue director, guiding actors through their lines. He proved so adept at rewriting maladroit dialogue that he soon turned to full-time screenwriting.
By the early 1970s, Mr. Stern’s Hollywood career had wound down: His final big-screen picture, all too fittingly titled “The Last Movie,” was directed by Dennis Hopper. The film, which tells the story of a South American movie shoot gone horribly wrong, was released in 1971 to poor notices.
Mr. Stern continued to write for television during the ’70s, but in the mid-1980s, assailed by the anxiety that had plagued him since he was a boy, he quit Hollywood, and screenwriting, for Seattle.
“Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me,” he said in the Seattle Times interview. “My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.”
In Seattle, where he made his home to the end of his life, Mr. Stern taught screenwriting at the University of Washington and at the Film School, a nonprofit educational organization he founded with Mr. Jacobsen.
Mr. Stern’s survivors include his wife, Marilee Stiles Stern.
His other screenwriting credits include “The Ugly American” (1963), based on the novel by Eugene Burdick and starring Marlon Brando, and “The James Dean Story,” a 1957 documentary directed by Robert Altman and George W. George. He was the author of a book, “No Tricks in My Pocket: Paul Newman Directs,” published in 1989.
A documentary about Mr. Stern and his work, “Going Through Splat,” directed by Jon Steven Ward, was released in 2005.
In an interview with The Vancouver Sun that year, Mr. Stern was asked whether his parents had ever seen “Rebel Without a Cause.”
“Yes; they thought it was marvelous,” he replied. “But they never recognized themselves.”
