Biography
Czenzi Ormonde (3 March 1906 – 24 July 2004) was an American novelist and screenwriter. Born in Tacoma, Washington, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and worked as a secretary at several Hollywood studios, including with Samuel Goldwyn. She began writing short stories for magazines in the early 1930s.
In 1950, Ormonde was recommended by Ben Hecht to Alfred Hitchcock to work on the screenplay for Strangers on a Train (1951) after difficulties with the original writer, Raymond Chandler. She is credited on the film alongside Chandler, though accounts indicate she produced much of the final script, often in collaboration with Barbara Keon and Alma Reville. She later wrote the screenplays for Step Down to Terror (1958) and the animated 1001 Arabian Nights (1959), as well as episodes for television series.
Ormonde published two novels: Laughter from Downstairs (1948), drawing on her childhood, and Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1954). She spent much of her later life in Hayden, Idaho.
