Charles William Brackett (Saratoga Springs, New York, November 26, 1892 – Los Angeles, March 9, 1969) was a novelist American who also worked as a screenwriter and film producer.
Charles Brackett was the son of Edgar Truman Brackett, lawyer and banker was member of the Senate of the United States, Scion of an old family whose origins go back to 1629, when its ancestor Richard Brackett arrived in the colony Bay of Massachusetts (near the present city of Braintree). Charles Brackett mother was Mary Emma Corliss, whose uncle, George Henry Corliss, had built the Centennial engine which provided power to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia.
Brackett graduated in 1915 at Williams College, and graduated in law from Harvard University. During the First world war he fought in the ranks of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and was Vice-Consul in local French of Saint-Nazaire. He was awarded the Medal of honor French. Back in the United States, regularly collaborated with publications like Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Vanity Fair.
His first novel appeared deliveries in the Saturday Evening Post newspaper in 1920. The second Week-End (1925), caught the attention of Harold Ross of The New Yorker, which offered Brackett as drama critic of the prestigious magazine. Held this post until 1929, which was replaced by Robert Benchley. Other two novels published during this period: That Last Infirmity (1926) and American Colony (1929). The latter, Entirely Surrounded, appeared in 1934. Ed Sikov, Billy Wilder biographer compared with Fitzgerald Brackett literary style.
In the 1930s he moved to Hollywood and started working as a screenwriter. Before 1936 he worked in at least seven indents, among them that of The Last Outpost (1935), starring Cary Grant. His best season as screenwriter however came when, in 1936, began collaborating with Billy Wilder, with whom he signed scripts for a total of 13 films, including classics like Ninotchka (1939), ball of fire (1941), lost weekend (1945) and the twilight of the gods (1950). This last marked the end of the collaboration between Wilder and Brackett, each of which he continued his career in solo. Brackett wrote and produced in the following years several films success, including Niagara (1953), Titanic and the King and I (1956; only production)
Did not participate in Double Indemnity (1944), because history he felt “sordid and dirty”, so it was the novelist Raymond Chandler who ended up writing the screenplay for this film to Wilder.
Between 1938 and 1939, he was President of Sindicato de Escritores Cinematográficos, and from 1949 to 1955 he presided over the Academy and the film. Received three Awards Academy Award for best screenplay: lost weekend (1945), the twilight of the gods (1950) and Titanic (1953), and in 1959 he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for the whole of his career.