New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Albertin, Walter, photographer. · Public domain

The only writer to win three solo Academy Awards for screenwriting, Chayefsky made his name writing naturalistic television dramas about ordinary Americans during the medium's early years, then carried that same unglamorous realism to film with Marty (1955). He turned satirical for The Hospital (1971) and especially Network (1976), a send-up of television news often called one of the most prescient screenplays ever written; both films, like much of his early work, drew on his Bronx childhood.