Paul Dehn

Paul Dehn was a British screenwriter. He was born in Manchester, educated at Shrewsbury School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He began his show-business career in 1936 as a film reviewer for several London newspapers. During the Second World War he worked in intelligence. He narrated the 1951 film Waters of Time and later wrote plays, operettas, and musicals for the stage. He wrote the lyrics for two films, The Innocents (1961) and Moulin Rouge (1952). In 1944 he met the composer James Bernard with whom he worked and who also became his life partner. Paul Dehn asked James Bernard to collaborate with him on the original screen story for the Boulting Brothers film Seven Days to Noon (1950. Through the 1960s Dehn concentrated on several superior espionage films, notably The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), and The Deadly Affair (1967). He later wrote the Planet of the Apes sequels. His poetry includes The Day's Alarm (1949) and The Romantic Landscape (1952), which included one of his best poems, ‘The Sunken Cathedral. Quake, Quake, Quake was published in 1961, with drawings by Edward Gorey; and The Fern on the Rock (1965).