Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, theatre director, film producer and screenwriter.[2] With a career spanning seven decades he received numerous accolades including two Tony Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and nominations for two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award.
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Levine
July 14, 1917
New York City, U.S.
May 5, 2011 (aged 93)
New York City, U.S.
- Playwright
- theatre director
- film producer
- screenwriter
English
1945–2011
Tom Hatcher (co. 1954; d. 2006)
After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), winning the Tony Award for Best Musical for the latter. He directed the musical La Cage aux Folles in 1983 and received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical.
Laurents also worked as a screenwriter on Hollywood films such as Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Rope (1948), Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Sydney Pollack's romance The Way We Were (1973). He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for the Herbert Ross drama film The Turning Point (1977).
Early life[edit]
Born Arthur Levine, Laurents was the son of middle-class Jewish parents, his father a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher, who gave up her career when she married.[3][4] He was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, New York, the elder of two children, and attended Erasmus Hall High School.[5][6] His sister Edith suffered from chorea as a child.[7]
His paternal grandparents were Orthodox Jews, and his mother's parents, although born Jewish, were atheists. His mother kept a kosher home for her husband's sake, but was lax about attending synagogue and observing the Jewish holidays. His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents's religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions,[8] although he continued to identify himself as Jewish.[9] However, late in life he admitted to having changed his last name from Levine to the less Jewish-sounding Laurents, "to get a job."[3]
After graduating from Cornell University, Laurents took an evening class in radio writing at New York University. William N. Robson, his instructor, a CBS Radio director/producer, submitted his script Now Playing Tomorrow, a comedic fantasy about clairvoyance, to the network, and it was produced in the Columbia Workshop series on January 30, 1939, with Shirley Booth in the lead role. It was Laurents' first professional credit. The show's success led to him being hired to write scripts for various radio shows, among them Lux Radio Theater.[10] Laurents' career was interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in the middle of World War II. Through a series of clerical errors, he never saw battle, but instead was assigned to the U.S. Army Pictorial Service located in a film studio in Astoria, Queens, where he wrote training films and met, among others, George Cukor and William Holden. He later was reassigned to write plays for Armed Service Force Presents, a radio show that dramatized the contributions of all branches of the armed forces.[11]
Death[edit]
Laurents died from complications of pneumonia at his home in Manhattan on May 5, 2011, aged 93.[28] Following a long tradition, Broadway theatre lights were dimmed at 8 p.m. on May 6, 2011, for one minute in his memory.[29] His ashes were buried alongside those of Tom Hatcher in a memorial bench in Quogue, Long Island, New York.[1]