"[3] Born in Chicago, Illinois, to a working-class Jewish family, he was the son of Fanny (née Rozin) and Isidore Foreman.

[5] He soon returned to Chicago and attended the John J. Marshall School of Law, working at a grocery store to earn money.

[6][3] Foreman dropped out of law school and worked as a newspaper reporter, fiction writer (selling stories to Esquire), press agent, play director and carnival barker.

[3] Foreman's first screen credit was for producer Sam Katzman at Monogram Pictures, Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941), starring the East Side Kids.

Foreman provided the original story (for $25) and wrote a script (for $200) for the next East Side Kids film, Spooks Run Wild (1941), with Bela Lugosi.

[3] Foreman's career was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, where he was assigned to a unit that made orientation and training films.

Kramer produced Foreman's next credited screenplay, So This Is New York (1948), starring comedian Henry Morgan, for Enterprise Productions; it was directed by Richard Fleischer.

Kramer and Foreman's next film, the boxing tale Champion (1949), was a big success, making a star of actor Kirk Douglas.

Champion had been directed by Mark Robson, and he, Kramer and Foreman reunited on Home of the Brave (1949), an adaptation of Arthur Laurents's play.

Kramer and Foreman's third film together was The Men (1950), which introduced Marlon Brando to cinema audiences; he played a paraplegic soldier.

Also acclaimed was their fourth film, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), an adaptation of the French classic play, starring José Ferrer, who won a Best Actor Oscar.

It was adapted from Brian Hooker's English translation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac.

As a result of his refusal to give the names of fellow Party members, Foreman was classified as an "uncooperative witness" and blacklisted by all of the Hollywood studio bosses.

High Noon, the film that was Foreman's greatest screenwriting accomplishment, made no mention of him as associate producer but did credit him for the screenplay.

He formed a new company, Carl Foreman Productions, whose stockholders originally included actor Gary Cooper.

Foreman would use the names of friends Herbert Baker, John Weaver, and Alan Grogan on his scripts as a personal signature.

[9] After working on Born for Trouble (1955), he wrote a draft of the screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for Sam Spiegel and David Lean.

The resulting Academy Award for adapted screenplay went to French author Pierre Boulle, who had written the source novel but who had no involvement in the script (and could not speak English).

[14] In August 1956, Foreman gained approval to go to the United States and testify in executive session before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he refused to become an informant.

Mouse was meant to be part of a four-picture slate from Foreman worth $11 million; the others were The League of Gentlemen (1960), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Holiday.

He was intending to follow it with The Holiday, with Anthony Quinn, Charles Boyer, Earl Holliman and Ingrid Bergman,[21] but the film was never produced.

He signed a contract with MGM to adapt The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, at a fee of $275,000, but this film was never made.

It developed a project called Fifteen Flags, about the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, but this was never completed as a film.

[citation needed] His final project was writing the screenplay for The Yellow Jersey, a proposed film about the Tour de France bicycle race.

[6] Carl Foreman was back home in the United States when he died of a brain tumor in 1984 in Beverly Hills, California.

The day before he died he was told he would receive the long overdue Oscar credit for writing Bridge on the River Kwai.

[27] When Stanley Kramer found out some of this, he forced Foreman to sell his part of their company, and tried to get him kicked off making this film.

He moved to England before the film was released, as Congress had established a blacklist and movie studios did not allow persons on it to work for them.

Influential society writer Hedda Hopper of the Los Angeles Times also pressed Foreman to testify about names.

Foreman was also the subject of an episode of Screenwriters: Words Into Image, directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock.