What promised to be a lucrative and successful career as a film writer - graduating up from Charlie Chan movies in the late 1930s to such well respected war films as Guadalcanal Diary (1943), a successful adaptation of Forever Amber (1947) and the police procedural Call Northside 777 (1948) - came to an abrupt end when he died of a sleeping pill overdose on board his yacht off Catalina Island in 1948.
[2] He received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Wing and a Prayer in 1944.
A native of West Virginia, Cady started as a newspaper copy boy.
[3] He spent time in New York in the 1930s with Fletcher & Ellis Inc. as its director of radio,[4] returning to Los Angeles in 1936.
He joined 20th Century Fox in 1940, having previously been employed at RKO between radio jobs.