Maxwell Anderson

48

Maxwell Anderson : biography

December 15, 1888 – February 28, 1959

The only one of his plays that he himself adapted to the screen was Joan of Lorraine, which became the film Joan of Arc (1948) starring Ingrid Bergman, with a screenplay by Anderson and Andrew Solt. When Bergman and her director changed much of his dialogue to make Joan "a plaster saint" he called her a "big, dumb, goddamn Swede!" Anderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his political drama Both Your Houses, and twice received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, for Winterset, and High Tor.

He enjoyed great commercial success with a series of plays set during the reign of the Tudor family, who ruled England, Wales and Ireland from 1485 until 1603. One play in particular – Anne of the Thousand Days – the story of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn – was a hit on the stage in 1948, but did not reach movie screens for 21 years. It opened on Broadway starring Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman, and, in 1969 became an Oscar-winning movie with Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold. Margaret Furse won an Oscar for the film’s costume designs.

Another of his Tudor plays, Elizabeth the Queen, was adapted as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), starring the legendary actress Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Still another of his plays involving Elizabeth I, Mary of Scotland (1936), was turned into a 1936 film, starring Katharine Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Fredric March as the Earl of Bothwell, and Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth. The play had been a hit on Broadway starring Helen Hayes in the title role.

His play Wingless Victory was written in verse and premiered in 1936 with actress Katharine Cornell in the lead role. It received mixed reviews.Tad Mosel, "Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell", Little, Brown & Co., Boston (1978)

Adaptations and awards

Honorary awards include the Gold Medal in Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954, an honorary doctor of literature degree from Columbia University in 1946, and an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University of North Dakota in 1958.

Two of Anderson’s other historical plays, Valley Forge, about George Washington’s winter there with the Continental Army), and Barefoot in Athens, concerning the trial of Socrates, were adapted for television. Valley Forge was adapted for television on three occasions – in 1950, 1951 and 1975. Anderson wrote book and lyrics for two successful musicals with composer Kurt Weill. Knickerbocker Holiday, about the early Dutch settlers of New York, featured Walter Huston as Peter Stuyvesant. The show’s standout number, September Song, became a popular standard. So did the title song of Anderson and Weill’s Lost in the Stars, a story of South Africa based on the Alan Paton novel Cry, The Beloved Country.

Anderson’s long-running 1927 comedy-drama about married life, Saturday’s Children, in which Humphrey Bogart made an early appearance, was filmed three times – in 1929 as a part-talkie, in 1935 (in almost unrecognizable form) as a B-film Maybe It’s Love and once again in 1940 under its original title, starring John Garfield in one of his few romantic comedies, along with Anne Shirley and Claude Rains. The play was also adapted for television in three condensed versions in 1950, 1952 and 1962.http://www.imdb.com/find?s=ep&q=Saturday%27s+Children

Anderson also adapted the William March novel The Bad Seed into his last successful Broadway stage play. He was hired by Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1957). Hitchcock also contracted with Anderson to write the screenplay for what became Vertigo (1958), but Hitchcock rejected his screenplay Darkling, I Listen.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/trivia

Personal life

Anderson married Margaret Haskett, a classmate, on August 1, 1911 in Bottineau, North Dakota. They had three sons, Quentin, Alan, and Terence. Anderson then wrote a prophetic play, "Saturday’s Children," about a vain, neurotic liar who cheats on her husband. When he catches her, she commits suicide by inhaling gas.The Life of Maxwell Anderson by Alfred S. Shivers, PhD published by Stein and Day, New York, 1983. ISBN 0-8128-2789-9