Robert Towne is a four-time Academy Award nominee, best known for his Oscar®-winning classic, Chinatown.

Released in 1974 and directed by Roman Polanski, Chinatown starred Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston. It received eleven Academy Award nominations and won one: Best Original Screenplay Oscar® to Robert Towne. He also won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award and a Golden Globe Award for Chinatown.

Mr. Towne is currently writing Mission Impossible III, and he is also preparing to direct his adaptation of John Fante's Ask the Dust.

Robert Towne's many screenwriting credits include Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), starring Jack Nicholson, for which Mr. Towne received an Academy Award nomination and won the BAFTA Award, Shampoo (1975), starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, and Goldie Hawn, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, Greystoke (under the nom de plume, P.H. Vazak, his much loved Komondor dog who, Mr. Towne feels, deserved a better screen credit), which brought him a fourth Academy Award nomination in 1985, Tony Scott's Days of Thunder (1990), starring Tom Cruise, The Firm (1993), directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Tom Cruise, Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible (1996), starring Tom Cruise, and Mission Impossible II (2000) directed by John Woo, again starring Tom Cruise.

Mr. Towne is also one of the most sought-after script doctors in Hollywood. His uncredited contributions include such notable films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), starring Marlon Brando, and The Parallax View (1974), starring Warren Beatty and directed by Alan J. Pakula, as well as the blockbuster hits Crimson Tide (1995), directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, and Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998), starring Bruce Willis.

Mr. Towne has also directed three of his own scripts: Personal Best (1982), starring Mariel Hemingway, Scott Glenn, and Patrice Donnelly, Tequila Sunrise (1988), starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kurt Russell, and Without Limits (1998), his critically acclaimed feature film about great Oregon distance runner Steve Prefontaine, starring Billy Crudup and Donald Sutherland.

Robert Towne has received numerous awards and award nominations honoring his work, including four nominations for WGA Screen Awards, two of which he won, for Chinatown and Shampoo. He was also honored in 1997 by the Writers Guild of America with its Screen Laurel Award, the WGA's highest honor. Regarding the award, Brad Radnitz, then president of the WGAw, said of Mr. Towne: "He is the writer's writer, singular in the depth, scope and success of his work. His screenplays have resulted in powerful images indelibly etched in our cultural consciousness. He stands out as the consummate craftsman...." Other recipients of the Screen Laurel Award have included Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and Billy Wilder.

Mr. Towne was born in Los Angeles and raised in San Pedro, where he worked as a tuna fisherman. He went on to study philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont.