Joseph Stefano

Template:Realworld Joseph William Stefano (5 May 1922 – 25 August 2006; age 84) was a writer for film and television. He wrote the story for the 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Skin of Evil", which featured the death of Natasha Yar. He also shared teleplay credit with Hannah Louise Shearer.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Stefano started out as a pop music composer in the 1940s before moving on to screenwriting in the late 1950s. After writing the 1958 drama The Black Dahlia, he was assigned by director Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay for his Psycho, which would become a huge success and would become Stefano's best-known work. (His script was later followed in the 1998 remake by Gus Van Sant). However, Stefano would turn down an offer to another screenplay for write Hitchcock in order to become a writer and producer for the classic science fiction series The Outer Limits during the show's first season (1963-64). The Outer Limits featured numerous Trek alumni in it's production crew and cast. Byron Haskin, Robert Justman, Fred Phillips and Wah Chang all worked on the series, just as directors Gerd Oswald, John Erman and writer Harlan Ellison.

Stefano also wrote screenplays for such films as The Naked Edge (1961), Eye of the Cat (1969), TV's Snowbeast (1977), The Kindred (1987), and Two Bits (1995, on which he also served as executive producer). Additionally, he became a writer and executive producer on the short-lived Swamp Thing series. He also returned to the Psycho fold in, writing the made-for-TV sequel Psycho IV: The Beginning.

Stefano died in 2006 after suffering injuries in a fall. He was 84 years old.

External links

• Joseph Stefano at Wikipedia
• Template:IMDb-link