'Nuremberg' writer Abby Mann dies

In a career spanning more than 50 years as a writer, director and producer, Mann returned repeatedly to morally conscious themes.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television and winner of the 1961 Academy Award for adapted screenplay for Judgment at Nuremberg, died Tuesday at age 80. Mann also won multiple Emmys, including one in 1973 for The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which created a maverick New York police detective named Theo Kojak. The film, starring Telly Savalas, was spun off into the long-running TV series Kojak. In a career spanning more than 50 years as a writer, director and producer, Mann returned repeatedly to morally conscious themes, doing films for television on such subjects as Martin Luther King Jr., human rights advocate Simon Weisenthal and the Teamsters. Mann was a struggling television writer in the 1950s when he became fixated on the postwar Nuremberg trials that brought to justice the top surviving leaders of the Nazi regime. Mann was born Abraham Goodman in Philadelphia on Dec. 1, 1927, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant. He grew up in a tough factory neighborhood where he said he always felt like an outsider.