Robert Ardrey (October 16, 1908, Chicago, Illinois – January 14, 1980, South Africa) was an American playwright and screenwriter who returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s.African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative, two of Robert Ardrey's most widely read works, as well as Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape (1967), were key elements in the public discourse of the 1960s that challenged earlier anthropological assumptions. Ardrey's ideas notably influenced Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the development of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Sam Peckinpah, to whom Strother Martin gave copies of two of Ardrey's books.
October 16, 1908, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died
January 14, 1980, Kalk Bay, South Africa
Place Of Birth
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Height
5' 9½" (1.77 m)
Profession
Writer, Miscellaneous Crew
Spouse
Helen Johnson (m. 1938–1960)
Children
Daniel Ardrey, Ross Ardrey
Star Sign
Libra
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Quote
1
Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster's fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst.
2
As is generally known, Hollywood is not exactly a place, any more than Victorian refers to the court of the departed queen. Even when I arrived there were few film studios left in the district of Los Angeles called Hollywood. Neither was it a state of mind, or a style, for while you might make Victorian furniture in Grand Rapids or pursue Victorian mores in Dusseldorf, Hollywood films were inimitable and could only be produced in the non-place called Hollywood.
3
I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control.
4
Intelligence is no human sideshow but an evolutionary main event. The power to foresee, to call upon the past in terms of the future, to evaluate, to imagine solutions, is a power flowing from old time springs. The human mind may be denied the policeman's privilege of arresting this instinct or that. It may sit as no more than a moderator in the eternal instinctual debate. But it is a moderator with unlimited investigative powers.
5
We build paradises in which we have no faith. When we renounce our hubris; when we see ourselves as a portion of something far older, far larger than are we; when we discover nature as our partner, not our slave, and laws applying to us as applying to all: then we shall find our faith returning.
6
A skepticism concerning what one beholds - whether in the arts, in the sciences, or in the deeply etched channels of fashionable response - contains a force essential to the survival of civilized man.
7
The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it.
8
Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits - of beauty and of adventure's embrace - are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?
9
We seek the sun. We pursue the wind. We attain the mountaintop and there, dusted with stars, we say to ourselves, Now I know why I was born.
10
The hungry psyche has replaced the hungry belly.
11
Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.
12
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
Lived in Rome, Italy, for 17 years, then spent his final two years in Cape Town, South Africa.
7
Wrote several books on anthropology, notably the widely read bestsellers "African Genesis" and "The Territorial Imperative", which dealt with the origins of human behavior.
8
Playwright, screenwriter and author. Graduate from the University of Chicago, Guggenheim Fellow (1937-38), Sidney Howard Memorial Award winner and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
Theatre Night
1985
TV Series play - 1 episode
Up from the Ape
1975
Documentary screenplay / story
Leuchtfeuer
1967
TV Movie play "Thunder Rock"
Khartoum
1966
written by
CBS Reports
1964
TV Series documentary writer - 1 episode
De vuurtorenwachter
1962
TV Movie
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
1962
screenplay
Schatten der Helden
1960
TV Movie play "Shadow of Heroes"
The Wonderful Country
1959
screenplay
BBC Sunday-Night Theatre
1959
TV Series play - 1 episode
Leuchtfeuer
1957
TV Movie play
The Power and the Prize
1956
screenplay
Quentin Durward
1955
screenplay
Thunder Rock
1955
TV Movie play
The Schumann Story
1950
Short
Madame Bovary
1949
screenplay
The Secret Garden
1949
screenplay
The Three Musketeers
1948
screenplay
Song of Love
1947
Thunder Rock
1946
TV Movie play
The Green Years
1946
screenplay
A Lady Takes a Chance
1943
screenplay
Thunder Rock
1942
play
They Knew What They Wanted
1940
screenplay
The Cowboy and the Lady
1938
contributing writer - uncredited
Miscellaneous
Title
Year
Status
Character
Kitty Foyle
1940
treatment - uncredited
Self
Title
Year
Status
Character
The Frost Programme
1970
TV Series
Himself
Monitor
1958
TV Series documentary
Himself
Nominated Awards
Year
Award
Ceremony
Nomination
Movie
1967
Oscar
Academy Awards, USA
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen
$7 Million
