AustLit

Journalist and script-writer.

Goff was born in Perth, Western Australia, to two concert musicians.

After starting work as a journalist at 15, Goff became gradually dissastified with the geographic and cultural isolation in Australia, and undertook a journey to England. In the UK, he worked a number of jobs, including as a bookmaker, before picking up a position on the Daily Mirror.

In the mid-1930s, the Mirror sent Goff to the United States as their Hollywood correspondent, and he decided not only to stay, but also to seek work as a script-writer.

Goff had several screenplays under his belt (Westerns, melodramas, and crime films) by the time World War II broke out. During the war, he made propaganda short films, and fortuitously met fellow script-writer Ben Roberts, engaged in the same work. Goff and Roberts were to collaborate on a range of scripts together over the next several decades, including White Heat (1949), which was nominated for an Oscar for script-writing (though the nomination, under Academy rules of the time, went to Virginia Kellogg, who had suggested the original idea).

In the mid 1950s, Goff was president of the screenwriters council of the Screen Writers Guild.

During the 1960s, Goff and Roberts (still working collaboratively) turned their attention to the relatively new medium of television, where they continued to be successful, writing and producing such programs as The Rogues and Charlie's Angels.

Goff died in 1999 of of Alzheimer's Disease.