Ben Roberts

Although a respected movie and television writer, Ben Roberts is best remembered for co-creating the popular 1970s television crime-drama "Charlie's Angels." Roberts got his start writing movies in the late 1930s/early 1940s, including such titles as "Crime Rave," "South of Panama," and "Gambling Daughters." At the end of the 1940s, Roberts received his first nomination (an Edgar Allan Poe Award), for 1949's "White Heat." Nearly a decade later, he co-wrote his best-known movie, 1957's "Man of a Thousand Faces" (a biography based on the life of Lon Chaney), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Roberts continued writing, and scored two Emmy Award nominations in the early 1970s, for his work (mostly as an executive producer) on the crime-drama television show "Mannix." But it was "Charlie's Angels" (which Roberts co-created with Ivan Goff), that would serve as Roberts's great career accomplishment--the show became a massive hit, and launched the careers of such actresses as Farrah Fawcett, among several others.