Izy Daymond American screenwriter who worked in tandem with director Billy Wilder. Country: USA

Biography of I.A.L. Diamond

I.A.L. Diamond, also known as Iz or Izi Diamond, was an American screenwriter who collaborated with director Billy Wilder. He was born as Icik Domnici on June 27, 1920, in Ungeny, Bessarabia (now Moldova). Diamond studied at Boys' High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he excelled in mathematics and won numerous medals in mathematical olympiads. After graduating in 1938, he unexpectedly enrolled in the journalism department at Columbia University, where he began writing for the student newspaper under the pseudonym "I.A.L. Diamond." Diamond's pseudonym's origin is unknown, but he jokingly referred to it as an abbreviation for "The Interscholastic Algebra League" or simply as a play on the nickname "Izzy" and the initials "A" and "L."

During his time at Columbia University, Diamond wrote for the Varsity Show and the Columbia Spectator. Despite plans to continue his education in graduate school, Diamond's success in writing the Varsity Show for four consecutive years led to an invitation to write for The New York Times in 1941, causing him to drop out of school. In the same year, he was noticed in Hollywood and invited to work as a screenwriter at Paramount Pictures, where he worked until 1943. He then moved to Warner Brothers and wrote the screenplay for his first feature film, "Murder in the Blue Room" in 1943. It was at Warner Brothers that he achieved his first success with the release of the film "Never Say Goodbye" in 1946, establishing Diamond as a sought-after screenwriter.

From 1951 to 1955, Diamond worked at 20th Century Fox, where he wrote screenplays for three films. In 1955, he became an independent screenwriter and began his 25-year collaboration with director Billy Wilder. This quarter-century partnership, starting with the film "Love in the Afternoon," led to a series of the best American comedies of the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the popular Lemmon-Matthau duo, and several Oscar nominations and wins. Diamond was nominated for an Oscar four times and won once. From 1959, Diamond also served as a producer for several films written by the Diamond-Wilder team. He was a three-time winner of the New York Film Critics Award and the Writers Guild of America Award, as well as the Writers Guild Laurel Award in 1979. In his later years, Diamond battled cancer and passed away at his home in Beverly Hills in 1988.

Diamond was married to screenwriter and writer Barbara Bentley from July 21, 1945. They had a son, television screenwriter and producer Paul Diamond.