Ernest Pendrell, noted documentary filmmaker, was born in London, England on December 27,
1913, and immigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended New York
University, Columbia, and the Sorbonne, but never completed a degree.
In the late 1930s, he started free-lancing for newspapers such as the Camden-Courier, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Philadelphia Ledger; for the Federated Press and the United
Press; and for the New Masses and other
periodicals. During World War II Pendrell worked in a war plant as a machinist; he had been
rejected for military service because of deafness in his left ear. Following the war, he
continued his writing while holding a variety of jobs as an executive in a textile factory,
a rubber-foam plant, and in a couturier-dress establishment.
In 1951 Pendrell began to write for television and his scripts appeared on the Theatre Guild Steel Hour, Naked City, East
Side-West Side, the Dupont Show of the
Week, The Play of the Week, and
on television abroad. Later in the decade he also began writing for the theater; produced in
Europe were Seven Times Monday (1957) and
The Tailor (1962).
In 1961 Pendrell turned to broadcast journalism and began working on documentaries for ABC.
In the next two decades, he produced, wrote, and directed thirty documentaries for various
networks. Many have been nominated for an Emmy, and many have won major awards including the
Overseas Press Club Award for Terror in Northern
Ireland; the Headliner Award for the program on medical evacuation from Vietnam,
To Save a Soldier; the Cine award for
The Pursuit of Excellence; the George
Washington Medal of the Freedom Foundation for The
American Adventure; and several Christopher Awards. His documentaries have
explored a wide range of controversial topics, including the condition of rural medicine,
abortion, the punishment of Nazi war criminals, welfare, the treatment of Black soldiers in
the American armed forces, amnesty for those who refused to fight in the Vietnam War, the
treatment of the aged and the very young, the energy crisis, and the continuing civil war in
Northern Ireland.
He also wrote the screenplay for The Guns of
August (Universal, 1964), a film about the outbreak of World War I.
Ernest Pendrell died of throat cancer on January 21, 1992 in The Bronx, New York City. From
his New York Times obiturary (Jan. 22, 1992), “From
1965 to 1978, Mr. Pendrell wrote and produced more than 30 documentaries for ABC News,
examining welfare, drug addiction, abortion and the energy crisis.”
