John Monks Jnr

Playwright, screenwriter and co-author of 'Brother Rat'

John Cherry Monks, playwright, screenwriter and actor: born Pleasantville New York 24 February 1910; married (one daughter); died Pacific Palisades, California 10 December 2004.

Unlike many Hollywood writers, John Monks Jnr was never pigeonholed during his lengthy career. Although he fashioned film vehicles for such screen tough guys as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd and Spencer Tracy, he also turned his hand to frothy musicals for Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Ray Bolger and Kathryn Grayson.

After attending Virginia Military Academy, Monks became an actor. While appearing in the Broadway play Rendezvous (1932), he collaborated with Fred Finkelhoffe, a fellow cadet at the academy, on a farce based on their experiences. Directed by George Abbott, their play Brother Rat was one of the stage hits of 1936, running 575 performances on Broadway, with two road companies touring America. In 1938 Warner Bros bought the screen rights. Eddie Albert, who had come to prominence in the play, made his screen début in the film version, in a cast that also included Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.

Monks wrote material for Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939, an all-black Broadway revue. Despite musical contributions from George Gershwin, Sammy Fain and Johnny Mercer and a luminous performance by Lena Horne, the show closed after only nine performances.

Hollywood came to the rescue when Monks and Finkelhoffe were signed by Warner Bros to write a follow-up to their Broadway hit. Although most of the cast of Brother Rat appeared in Brother Rat and a Baby (1940), the sequel was an anticlimax. That same year Monks and Finkelhoffe moved over to MGM to fashion the hit musical Strike Up the Band for the red-hot team of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

During the Second World War, Monks served as an officer in the Third Marine Regiment. He met Louis De Rochemont, producer of the March of Time newsreel series, who was making propaganda films for the services, and co-wrote for him the documentary We Are the Marines (1942), which dealt with the history of the corps and its role in the fighting.

After the war, he and De Rochemont again joined forces to make The House on 92nd Street (1945), a documentary-style feature film about the FBI's capture of a German spy ring. The first in a series of thrillers shot on actual locations, its success led to Monks and De Rochemont's realistic 13 Rue Madeleine (1947), in which an OSS agent (James Cagney) is sent to occupied Paris to discover the whereabouts of a German rocket-projectile site.

Now much in demand, Monks bobbed from studio to studio, writing such films as Wild Harvest (1947), which starred Alan Ladd, Knock on Any Door (1949), which starred Humphrey Bogart, and The People Against O'Hara (1951), which starred Spencer Tracy.

He returned to Warner Bros and to Brother Rat territory when he wrote The West Point Story (1950), a musical reuniting him with James Cagney. For the same studio, he adapted Where's Charley? (1952), based on Charley's Aunt, with Ray Bolger repeating his stage success as Charley. Again for Warner Bros, Monks wrote So This is Love (1953), in which a blonde Kathryn Grayson played the American opera star Grace Moore. Although most remembered Moore for her film appearances in the 1930s, the climax of So This is Love was her triumphant 1928 début at the Metropolitan Opera House. "I received 27 curtain calls," said Grayson's tremulous voice-over at the end of the film. "One for every year of my life - and one to grow on."

Monks turned again to screen biography when he and Richard Goldstone wrote, produced and directed No Man is an Island (1962). Filmed on location in the Philippines, it was the somewhat fictionalised story of the naval hero George R. Tweed (Jeffrey Hunter), whose signals from a secret outpost on Japanese-held Guam helped the US Navy to liberate that island during the Second World War.

John Monks wrote a book, A Ribbon and a Star (1945), based on his experiences in the Marines. He looked back with fondness on his acting days, and even made cameo appearances in such films as Paradise Alley (1961). "Once an actor, always an actor," he said.

Dick Vosburgh