Donald Wrye was a writer, director and producer best known for his work on the 1978 romantic drama Ice Castles, about a young figure skater whose dreams are dashed after a tragic accident. He also wrote and directed the 2010 remake.
Additionally, Wrye was a two-time Oscar nominee for producing a pair of documentary shorts: 1969’s An Impression of John Steinbeck: Writer, with Henry Fonda providing the voice of the Noel Prize-winning author, and 1971’s The Numbers Start with the River, about small-town life in Iowa.
Wrye graduated from UCLA’s film school and earned one of his first credits in 1961 as a production assistant on the film The Explosive Generation, starring William Shatner, about a high school teacher who gets in trouble when he tries to teach a sex-education class. He worked extensively in television movies, with credits that included The Entertainer, starring Jack Lemmon; It Happened One Christmas, starring Orson Welles; Fire on the Mountain, starring Ron Howard; a 1977 adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life; Divorce Wars: A Love Story, Lucky Day; and his most controversial, 1974’s Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair, directly after her role in The Exorcist, as a teenage runaway who is subjected to abuse when she ends up in a juvenile detention facility.
Donald Wrye was a writer, director and producer best known for his work on the 1978 romantic drama Ice Castles, about a young figure skater whose dreams are dashed after a tragic accident. He also wrote and directed the 2010 remake.
Additionally, Wrye was a two-time Oscar nominee for producing a pair of documentary shorts: 1969’s An Impression of John Steinbeck: Writer, with Henry Fonda providing the voice of the Noel Prize-winning author, and 1971’s The Numbers Start with the River, about small-town life in Iowa.
Wrye graduated from UCLA’s film school and earned one of his first credits in 1961 as a production assistant on the film The Explosive Generation, starring William Shatner, about a high school teacher who gets in trouble when he tries to teach a sex-education class. He worked extensively in television movies, with credits that included The Entertainer, starring Jack Lemmon; It Happened One Christmas, starring Orson Welles; Fire on the Mountain, starring Ron Howard; a 1977 adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life; Divorce Wars: A Love Story, Lucky Day; and his most controversial, 1974’s Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair, directly after her role in The Exorcist, as a teenage runaway who is subjected to abuse when she ends up in a juvenile detention facility.
Wrye also wrote, directed and executive produced Amerika, a 1987 seven-part, 15-hour miniseries for ABC, about a Soviet Union takeover of the United States, starring Kris Kristofferson.
Wrye died May 15, 2015, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was 80.
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