Ivan Goff Collection of Television Scripts

Ivan Goff was born in Perth, Australia, on April 17, 1910. He began his career as a journalist for a local newspaper, but came to dislike the relative isolation of the country from the rest of the world. He eventually made his way to England where he worked several jobs while trying to break into journalism.

In 1936, Goff became the Hollywood Correspondent for the London Daily Mirror. Goff decided to settle in Hollywood, where he worked as a staff writer at Republic Studios and then Warner Brothers.

At the start of World War II, Goff joined the Army Signal Corps, and made propaganda shorts in New York. During this time, Goff met a fellow writer named Ben Roberts and started a writing partnership with him that lasted 39 years.

Goff and Roberts' first work was the play Portrait in Black, which had runs in London and Broadway and was developed into a movie in 1960. The duo also wrote several movies for Warner Brothers, including White Heat (1949), and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), for which they received an Oscar nomination. From 1954-55 Goff served as the President of the Screen Writer Guild.

In the 1960s, Goff and Roberts shifted to working in television, writing and producing a number of series, including The Rogues (1964), Mannix (1967-75), and Charlie's Angels (1976-81).

Goff married actress Natalie Draper in 1948, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1964. They had three sons, Kevin, Trevor, and Brian. Goff died at the age of 89 in Santa Monica, CA, on September 23, 1999.