Ted Tally (born April 9, 1952) is an Academy Award winning American playwright and screenwriter. He was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Career

Screenwriter

Born William Theodore Tally in North Carolina, Tally was educated at Yale College and the Yale School of Drama, and has also taught at each of them. His most notable credit is the screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs, which won him the Academy Award for Best Screenplay as well as the Writers Guild of America Award, Chicago Film Critics Award and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Other scripts include White Palace, Before and After, Outbreak, and All the Pretty Horses.

After declining to write the screenplay for Hannibal, Tally returned to the Hannibal Lecter franchise to write Red Dragon. When asked by Inside Film Online magazine why he opted not to write the screenplay for Hannibal, he responded, "For a lot of reasons. I didn't like the book. The director, Jonathan Demme, and I read it and were horrified. We didn't see how we could make a movie from it that we could be proud of and not feel sleazy about it, without making it a totally different story, which we could have done on our own. It was upsetting because we had a friendship with Tom Harris and felt we owed him a lot. But he was defensive and didn't want anything changed and it was frustrating because it would have been the biggest payday for all of us, putting us up there in Spielberg territory." [1]Inside Film Magazine, "Austin Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference Draws Top Talent," April 1999.