Peter Viertel

Peter Viertel is an author and screenwriter. He was born on November 16 1920 in Dresden, Germany to the writer/actress Salka Viertel and the writer Berthold Viertel. He grew up in Santa Monica, California.

He is most famous for his novel White Hunter Black Heart which was made into a film starring Clint Eastwood in 1990. By his own admission, the novel is an account of his time working on the script to The African Queen, and the central character in the novel is Pete Verrill, a thinly-disguised pseudonym.

Viertel has been married twice; firstly to Victoria Schulberg and then to the actress Deborah Kerr on 23 July 1960.

Films

Saboteur (1942)
The Hard Way (1943)
We Were Strangers (1949)
Roughshod (1949)
Decision Before Dawn (1951)
The African Queen (1951)
The Sun Also Rises (1957)
Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (1958)
The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
Le Couteau dans la plaie (1962)
White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

Books

The Canyon (1940)
Line of Departure (1947)
White Hunter Black Heart (1953)
Love Lies Bleeding (1964)
Bicycle on the Beach (1971)
American Skin (1984)
Dangerous Friends: At Large with Huston and Hemingway in the Fifties (1992)
Loser Deals (1995)

External links

*Peter Viertel (fan-site)
*1992 audio interview of Peter Viertel by Don Swaim