Why Nancy Dowd is on this page

Nancy Dowd (born 1945, Framingham, Massachusetts) is an American screenwriter who shared the 1979 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Coming Home and wrote the cult hockey comedy Slap Shot. She is one of the small group of women to win an Oscar in a screenwriting category in the 1970s, and remains a touchstone reference for screenwriters working at the seam between studio comedy and the political New Hollywood of the late Vietnam era.

Dowd grew up in Framingham, the daughter of a machine-tool plant operator, and graduated from Smith College, where she became a lifelong friend of the journalist Molly Ivins, before spending her junior year at the Sorbonne. After teaching English in Tokyo she enrolled in the UCLA Film School, taking a master’s degree and working as a student assistant to the director King Vidor. Her first commissioned screenplay was the antiwar story “Buffalo Ghost,” written for Jane Fonda; the script was reworked by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones and filmed as Coming Home (1978), for which the three writers shared the Academy Award. Dowd’s brother Ned Dowd, then a minor-league hockey player with the Johnstown Jets, was the inspiration for her original screenplay Slap Shot (1977), directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman; Ned and his wife both appeared in the film. She went on to write Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982) and to contribute, often uncredited or under the pseudonyms “Rob Morton” and “Ernest Morton,” to Straight Time, North Dallas Forty, Ordinary People, Swing Shift, White Nights and Let It Ride; she also wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980–1981 season.

Dowd belongs to the wider Irish-American Dowd diaspora; her family’s specific Irish county of origin is not confirmed in the public record, and we mark it honestly here rather than invent. She joins a strikingly literary cluster of 20th-century American Dowds — alongside Maureen Dowd in journalism and Ann Dowd on screen — whose Irish lines run through too many generations of Atlantic crossings to leave a tidy paper trail. If a relative reading this can place the family, please get in touch.

Her brother Ned Dowd, also the subject of a Wikipedia entry of his own, went on to a long second career as a film producer (notably on The Last of the Mohicans and Master and Commander), an unusually direct example of the Slap Shot-era Dowds turning their hockey background into film work.

Notable work

• F.T.A. (1972, documentary, contributing writer)
• Slap Shot (1977, original screenplay)
• Coming Home (1978, screenplay with Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones)
• Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay (1979, for Coming Home)
• Saturday Night Live, writer (1980–1981 season)
• Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982, as “Rob Morton”)
• Swing Shift (1984, as “Rob Morton”)
• Let It Ride (1989, as “Ernest Morton”)

Heritage notes

Family root: Framingham, Massachusetts (Irish-American Dowd family — Irish county unconfirmed).

The directory threads Nancy Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.