Talbot Jennings


Talbot Lanham Jennings was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received two Academy Award nominations for co-writing the screenplays for Mutiny on the Bounty and Anna and the King of Siam.

Biography

He was born in 1894 in Shoshone, Idaho, his father was an Episcopal archdeacon for Idaho and Wyoming. He attended Nampa High School before World War I in which he saw active service.
After to war he went to University of Idaho and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1924. He was president of the Associated Students and wrote Light on the Mountains, a state history set to music. He also edited the yearbook, Gem of the Mountains, and the Blue Bucket, the English Department literary publication.
Jennings did a master's degree at Harvard University, then attended Yale Drama School.
Talbot wrote and co-wrote 17 screenplays including Mutiny on the Bounty, Romeo and Juliet, Anna and the King of Siam, Knights of the Round Table, The Good Earth and Northwest Passage. He wrote many screenplays for television also. A story he wrote became The Sons of Katie Elder, and was his last film.
In the 1940 B-movie The Devil's Pipeline, Richard Arlen and Andy Devine play characters named Talbot and Jennings, apparently an inside joke by one of its writers.
He died at East Glacier Park, Montana.

Plays