42 20th century Canadian screenwriters

Louise Archambault is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her films Familia, which won the Claude Jutra Award in 2005, and Gabrielle, which won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Picture in 2014.

Jean-Yves Bigras was a Canadian film director and film editor, considered a pioneer in Quebec cinema. Bigras studied first at the University of Ottawa and then at Queen's University. From 1939 to 1942, he served in World War II as part of the RCAF. When he returned to Canada, he became one of the first French Canadians to be hired by the NFB and worked there as an editor until 1948. He was then hired to work in Renaissance Éducationnel, the children's education film section of Renaissance Films Distribution. It was here that he got to work on his first feature film, Le gros Bill (1949), co-directing with René Delacroix. Bigras moved on to direct three feature films himself, including La petite Aurore l’enfant martyre (1951), a big hit with audiences and a staple of Quebec Cinema. In 1953, he began working for Radio-Canada where he became one of its principal directors until his death in 1966.

Martyn Burke is a Canadian director, novelist and screenwriter from Toronto, Ontario.

James Francis Cameron is a Canadian filmmaker, producer, and environmentalist. He is best known for making science fiction and epic films. Cameron first gained recognition for directing The Terminator (1984). He found further critical and commercial success with Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and the comedy thriller True Lies (1994). His other big-budget productions include Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), with the former earning him Academy Awards in Best Picture, Best Director and Best Film Editing. Avatar, filmed in 3D technology, also garnered him nominations in the same categories.

Silver Donald Cameron was a Canadian journalist, author, playwright, and university teacher whose writing focused on social justice, nature, and the environment. His 15 books of non-fiction dealt with everything from history and politics to education and community development.

John Franklin Candy was a Canadian actor and comedian known mainly for his work in Hollywood films. Candy rose to fame as a member of the Toronto branch of the Second City and its Second City Television (SCTV) series, and through his appearances in comedy films including Stripes, Splash, Cool Runnings, Summer Rental, Home Alone, The Great Outdoors, Spaceballs, and Uncle Buck, as well as more dramatic roles in Only the Lonely and JFK. One of his most renowned onscreen performances was as Del Griffith, the talkative shower-curtain ring salesman in the John Hughes comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles. In addition to his work as an actor, Candy was a co-owner of the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League from 1991 until his death, and the team won the 1991 Grey Cup under his ownership. Candy died of a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 43. His final two films, Wagons East and Canadian Bacon, are dedicated to his memory.

Evelyn Spice Cherry was a Canadian documentary filmmaker, director, and producer. She is best known for her work as the head of the Agricultural Films Unit at the National Film Board of Canada and as a member of the British Documentary Film Movement.

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. His work explored religion, politics, isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death and romantic relationships. Cohen was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for Financial Times. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Dis, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck.

William James Craft was a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He directed 69 films between 1910 and 1931. He is also credited with writing for 12 films between 1920 and 1928. Craft was born in Toronto and died from injuries received in an auto accident.

Judith Rosemary (Sparks) Crawley was a Canadian film producer, cinematographer, director, and screenwriter. She and her husband Frank Radford "Budge" Crawley co-founded the production company Crawley Films in 1939.

Pen Densham is a British–Canadian film and television producer, writer, director, author and photographer, known for writing and producing films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and television revivals of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, as well as writing, producing and directing MGM's Moll Flanders.

William Herbert Deverell is a Canadian novelist, activist, and criminal lawyer. He is one of Canada's best-known novelists, whose first book, Needles, which drew on his experiences as a criminal lawyer, won the McClelland & Stewart $50,000 Seal Award. In 1997 he won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing in North America for Trial of Passion. That book also won the 1998 Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian crime novel, as did April Fool in 2003. Trial of Passion launched his first crime series, featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, a series that continued with April Fool, Kill All the Judges, Snow Job, and I'll See You in My Dreams.

Jean-Philippe Duval is a Canadian film and television director from Quebec City, Quebec. He is most noted for his 1999 films Matroni and Me , for which he received Jutra Award nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 2nd Jutra Awards, and a Genie Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 20th Genie Awards, and his 2009 film Through the Mist , which received Jutra nominations for both Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 12th Jutra Awards.

Winnifred Eaton was a Canadian author and screenwriter. Although she was of Chinese-British ancestry, she published under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna and under the name Winifred Reeve.

Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.

Joan Helen Finnigan was a Canadian writer and poet. She won a Genie Award for Best Screenplay in 1969. She wrote over 30 books, many of them oral histories of the Ottawa Valley.

Thomas "Thom" Fitzgerald is an American-Canadian film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright and producer.

Emma Gendron was a French-Canadian screenwriter, playwright, and journalist, born in 1895 in Saint-Barnabé, Quebec, Canada. She has been noted as one of the primary figures in Quebecois silent cinema and was likely one of the first female screenwriters in Quebec.

John Greyson is a Canadian director, writer, video artist, producer, and political activist, whose work frequently deals with gay themes. Greyson is also a professor at York University's film school, where he teaches film and video theory, film production, and editing. He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in the 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.

Claude-Henri Grignon was a French-Canadian novelist, journalist and politician, best known for his 1933 novel Un Homme et son péché.

Germaine Guèvremont, born Grignon was a Canadian writer, who was a prominent figure in Quebec literature.

Dany Laferrière is a Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist who writes in French. He was elected to seat 2 of the Académie française on 12 December 2013, and inducted in May 2015.

Jean-Claude Lauzon was a Canadian filmmaker. Born to a humble family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Lauzon worked a variety of odd jobs after dropping out of high school. He went on to study film at the Université du Québec à Montréal at the behest of Andre Petrowski, a member of the National Film Board of Canada. His two feature-length films, Night Zoo , and Léolo, established him as one of the most important Canadian directors of his time.

Roger Lemelin, was a Quebec novelist, television writer and essayist.

Michael Lewis MacLennan is a Canadian playwright, television writer and television producer, best known as a writer and producer of television series such as Queer as Folk and Bomb Girls.

Fletcher Markle was a Canadian actor, screenwriter, television producer and director. Markle began a radio career in Canada, then worked in radio, film and television in the US.

Brian Moore, was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.

John Morgan was a Welsh-born Canadian comedian.

Robert Morin is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer.

Sidney Olcott was a Canadian-born film producer, director, actor and screenwriter.

Martha Ostenso. She was a Norwegian American novelist and screenwriter.

Gladys Louise Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-American film actress and producer with a career that spanned five decades. A pioneer in the American film industry, she co-founded Pickford–Fairbanks Studios and United Artists, and was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Paul Lewis Quarrington was a Canadian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, musician and educator.

Mordecai Richler was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997). His 1970 novel St. Urbain's Horseman and 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's fantasy series. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-Semitism, generated considerable controversy.

Earle Rodney was a Canadian screenwriter, actor, and film director. He wrote for 108 films between 1926 and 1947. He also acted in 69 films between 1915 and 1929. He was born in Toronto, and died in Los Angeles, California from pneumonia.

Nell Shipman was a Canadian actress, author, screenwriter, producer, director, animal rights activist and animal trainer.

Kevin Tierney, was a Canadian film producer from Montreal who co-wrote and produced the most popular Canadian film of all time at the domestic box office, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, for which he earned a Golden Reel, the Genie Award for Best Motion Picture in 2007. He is a former vice-chair of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and former chair of the board of Cinémathèque québécoise.

Dragan Todorović is a writer and multimedia artist. Until 1995 he lived in Yugoslavia, where he worked as a journalist, editor, and television personality.

May Tully was a Canadian actress, writer, director, and producer in theatre and film, and, according to sportswriter Damon Runyon, "perhaps the greatest woman baseball fan that ever lived."

Pierre Turgeon is a Canadian novelist and essayist from Quebec.

Clement Virgo is a Canadian film and television writer, producer and director who runs the production company, Conquering Lion Pictures, with producer Damon D'Oliveira. Virgo is best known for co-writing and directing an adaptation of the novel by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2015), a six-part miniseries that aired on CBC Television in Canada and BET in the United States.