Ernest Vajda

Biography

The Hungarian playwright and novelist Ernest Vajda was educated at a monastic college in Paps, where he graduated with a degree in electrochemistry in 1904. He added a Ph.D. to his name in 1908 and produced his first play the following year. Vajda held several editorial jobs in Hungary before moving to the United States, settling down in Beverly Hills and joining Paramount as a contract writer in 1925. He was chiefly associated with comedies starring Adolphe Menjou, and, from 1929, collaborated on several films -- noted for their continental sophistication -- with the director Ernst Lubitsch (their most celebrated effort was the classic musical comedy The Love Parade (1929)). Vajda also continued to write plays for the Broadway stage, including the comedy "Fata Morgana", which was aired twice (in 1924 and in 1931). He moved to MGM in 1932, where he stayed for six years, working in collaboration on lavish period dramas like The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Marie Antoinette (1938). Though he authored no further screenplays after 1941, he contributed original material to the John Philip Sousa biopic Stars and Stripes Forever (1952).