Abby Mann, the Jewish screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Judgment at Nuremberg,” has died.
Mann, born Abraham Goodman, was 80 when he died Tuesday, The Associated Press reported. Mann had scripted a TV play about the postwar Nuremberg trials of Nazi war crimes and wanted it made into a movie; many in Hollywood worried that he was obsessed with the topic, he later said.
“A lot of people didn’t want it done,” he told AP in 1994. “People wanted to sweep the issue under the rug.”
Stanley Kramer ultimately agreed to direct it, and the 1961 film won two Oscars – for Mann and an acting nod for Maximilian Schell.
Mann tackled the Holocaust in at least two other projects, “Ship of Fools,” a 1965 film about a motley crowd – including Jews and Nazis – on a transatlantic prewar cruise, and the 1989 TV movie “The Simon Wiesenthal Story,” about the famed Nazi hunter.
Mann also tackled U.S. racism a number of times. His 1973 TV movie “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” about a black teenager framed by corrupt cops for murder, was the basis for the long-running TV series “Kojak.”
