Lillian Hellman

At 79 years old, Lillian Hellman physical status not available right now. We will update Lillian Hellman's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905-1984), an American dramatist and screenwriter best known for her Broadway debut as a playwright, as well as her Marxist sympathies and feminist activism.

She was blacklisted after appearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the 1950-52 anti-communist movement.

Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry resulted in a decrease in her earnings.

Many lauded Hellman for refusing to answer questions requested by HUAC, but others suspected her that she belonged to the Communist Party, despite her denial. Hellman, a playwright, had many successes on Broadway, including Watch on the Rhine, Toys in the Attic, Another Part of the Forest, The Children's Hour, and The Little Foxes.

Bette Davis starred in the semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes and received an Academy Award nomination in 1942. Hellman was romantically connected with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, author of the classic detective books The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, who was also blacklisted for ten years until his death in 1961.

The couple never married. Hellman's credibility was questioned after she brought a libel lawsuit against Mary McCarthy.

McCarthy wrote that "every word she writes is a lie" in 1979, on The Dick Cavett Show, including "and" and "the." Investigators discovered in Hellman's most popular memoirs, such as Pentynto, during the libel trial.

According to them, the "Julia" portion of Pentimento, which had spawned the Oscar-winning 1977 film of the same name, was based on Muriel Gardiner's life.

Hellman's memories of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were inaccurate, according to Martha Gellhorn, one of the twentieth century's most prominent war correspondents, as well as Ernest Hemingway's third wife.

McCarthy, Gellhorn, and others accused Hellman of lying about her Communist Party membership and being an unrepentant Stalinist.

Early life and marriage

Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Jewish family. Julia Newhouse of Demopolis, Alabama, was her mother, and her father, Max Hellman, a New Orleans shoe salesman, was her father. Sophie Marx, a prosperous banking family, and Leonard Newhouse, a Demopolis liquor dealer, were Julia Newhouse's parents. She spent half of her childhood in New Orleans, in a boarding home run by her aunts, and the other half in New York City. She attended Columbia University for two years before then enrolling in many classes.

Though Hellman married Arthur Kober, a playwright and press agent, on December 31, 1925, the two of them often lived apart. In 1929, she travelled around Europe for a while and then settled in Bonn to continue her education. She felt an early attraction to a Nazi student group that argued for "a sort of socialism" before the women who challenged her Jewish ties made their antisemitism a reality, and she returned immediately to the United States. "It's first time in my life I worried about being a Jew," she wrote.

For about a year as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, she wrote summaries of books and periodical literature for potential screenplays. Despite the fact that she found the job rather boring, it gave her many opportunities to meet a larger variety of creative people as she became involved in more political and artistic scenes during this period. While there, she met and fell in love with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. In 1932, she divorced Kober and returned to New York City. She was 24 and 36 years old when she first encountered Hammett in a Hollywood restaurant. They stayed in touch until his death in January 1961.

The Children's Hour, a Hellman's drama, premiered on Broadway on November 24, 1934, and it went for 691 performances. It depicts a false accusation of lesbianism by a schoolgirl against two of her teachers. The falsehood is discovered, but before amends can be made, one teacher is dismissed by her fiancé and the other commits suicide. Hellman returned to Hollywood as a screenwriter for Goldwyn Pictures after the success of The Children's Hour. She appeared in a screenplay for The Dark Angel, a pre-play and silent film.

Goldwyn purchased the rights to The Children's Hour for $35,000 while it was still being seen on Broadway following the film's success in 1935. Hellman rewrote the script to meet the Motion Picture Production Code's requirements, under which any mention of lesbianism was not permitted. Rather, one schoolteacher has been accused of having sex with the other's fiancé. It was published in 1936 under the name These Three Sisters. She wrote the screenplay for Dead End (1937), which was the first appearance of the Dead End Kids and premiered in 1937.

Hellman belonged to the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Dashiell Hammett, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I.F. Arthur Miller, Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, and Arthur Miller. Members of the Communist Party or fellow travelers were mainly tourists.)

Hellman, who joined the struggling Screen Writers Guild in 1935, devoted herself to recruiting new members and was one of the group's most vocal advocates. One of its main topics was the authoritarian way writers praised writers for their work, also known as "screen credit." Hellman had no appreciation for any of her earlier works, although she was the principal author of The Westerner (1934) and a main contributor to The Melody Lingers On (1935).

Days to Come closed down Broadway after just seven performances in December 1936. She portrayed a labour conflict in a small Ohio town in which the characters struggled to strike a balance between owner and employees, which was also valid. Her decision not to take sides was condemned by Communist organizations. During the Spanish Civil War, she joined several other literary figures, including Dorothy Parker and Archibald MacLeish, in establishing and funding Contemporary Historians, Inc. to fund a film project, The Spanish Earth, to demonstrate her love for the Spanish Civil War's anti-Franco forces.

Hellman was part of a group of 88 Americans with the name "An Open Letter to American Liberals" on March 1937, which led to a movement led by John Dewey to look at Leon Trotsky's defence against his 1936 condemnation by the Soviet Union in a letter. Some commentators have characterized the letter as a rebuttal of Stalin's Moscow Purge Trials. Some of Trotsky's leaders were charged with trying to destabilize the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union "should be left to shield the Soviet Union from treasonable plots as it saw fit." It urged liberals and liberals in the United States to unite against the growing threat of fascism and prevent an investigation that will only fuel "the reactionary sections of the newspaper and public" in the United States. "There are more significant questions than Trotsky's guilt," the New Republic's editors said, supporting this view. Many who signed the Open Letter called for a united front against fascism, which, they believed, needed uncritical assistance of the Soviet Union.

Hellman, a writer from Spain, spent a few weeks in Spain to give her assistance to the International Brigades of non-Spaniards who had joined the Spanish Civil War's anti-Franco faction. On Madrid's bombings, she gave a report to the US on Madrid Radio. Martha Gellhorn, the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, debating the account in Hellman's memoirs, and claiming that the witnesses were dead before describing events that never happened. Nevertheless, Hellman had chronicled her trip to the New Republic in April 1938 as "A Day in Spain." Langston Hughes wrote a glowing review of the radio broadcast in 1956.

Hellman was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1940, according to her own account, "the most casual member." I attended very few meetings and saw nothing more than people sitting around a room discussing current events or discussing the books they had read. I departed from the Communist Party because I seemed to be in the wrong place. My own maverick personality was no more appropriate to the political left than it had been to the conservative roots from which I came."

On February 13, 1939, her Little Foxes opened on Broadway and ran for 410 performances. Tallulah Bankhead played Regina, and the play toured extensively in the United States after its success on Broadway. Hellman's personal favorite and by far the most commercially and critically successful play she created. However, Tallulah wanted to perform for a benefit for Finnish Relief because the USSR had just invaded Finland, and she had an epic feud with Bankhead. Bankhead and the cast announced the benefit in the press, without thinking that Hellman's permission was necessary. The Hellman and Shumlin refused to allow the benefit presentation after they were shocked, citing non-intervention and anti-militarism. "I've adopted Spanish Loyalist orphanage or sent money to China," bankhead told reporters, "why has [they] suddenly become so insular?" says Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman, both being strenuous proponents.

Hellman responded to her role by saying, "I don't believe in the tiny, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone is so excited about." "I've been there, and it seems like a little pro-Nazi Republic to me." Bankhead, a centrist betrayal of the Second Spanish Republic and a huge fan of Communism since the 1930s, was outraged by Hellman's behavior, who branded him a moral hypocrite. Hellman had never been to Finland before. Hellman's defiance was motivated by her zealous allegiance to the Soviet Communist Party in Soviet Russia, according to Bankhead and the film. Hellman and Bankhead became rivals as a result of the conflict, and they stopped talking to each other for a quarter of a century.

Hellman escalated the issue by claiming that the sole reason for turning down the grant was because the Spanish Republican government was devolving to Franco's fascists, Hellman and Shumlin requested that Bankhead provide the Spanish loyalists fleeing to neighboring France, but the actor and company denied. Following being turned on by Stalinist fighters behind their own political lines, bankhead was further incensed by these remarks. Hellman and Bankhead will not talk again until late 1963. Joseph Wood Krutch, a drama critic, recalled how he and fellow critic George Jean Nathan shared a taxi with Hellman and Bankhead years later.

At a luncheon of the American Booksellers Association on January 9, 1940, she was watching the propagation of fascism in Europe and fearing similar political events in the United States.

Watch on the Rhine opened on Broadway on April 1, 1941, and went for 378 performances. It received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, which was a distinction given to it. Following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, she wrote the play in 1940, when it called for a united international alliance against Hitler specifically contradicted the Communist position at the time. Hellman accompanied the production to Washington, D.C., where she met with President Roosevelt in 1942. Hammett wrote the screenplay for the 1943 film version.

Hellman and Ernest Hemingway co-hosted a dinner in October 1941 to raise funds for anti-Nazi activists detained in France. Governor Herbert Lehman encouraged himself to participate, but he had to leave because some of the funding organizations, he said, "have long been associated with Communist activities." Hellman replied, "I do not and I did not request the political views of any members of the committee," she said, "because there is nobody who can vouch for anyone but themselves." She promised that the funds would be used as planned and then presented him with a detailed account. "I am positive it will make you sad and ashamed, as it did me." Five of the seven resignations out of 147 sponsors, five of whom were Jews, were Jews, according to the next month. Of all the people in the world, I believe we should be the last to refuse assistance, from those who fought for us."

Hellman received an Academy Award nomination for her screenplay for The Little Foxes' film version in 1942. She received her second award for her screenplay for The North Star, the only original screenplay of her career two years ago. She protested that the film's success turned a village festival into "an extended opera bouffe characters based on musical comedy characters," but that it was still "a valuable and true portrait that shows a good deal of the truth about fascism," she told the New York Times. Hellman published her screenplay in the fall of 1943 to establish the difference between her screenplay and film. Robert Conquest, a British historian, said it was "a tragedy greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but not in collective-farm situations."

Hellman's The Hunting Wind opened on Broadway in April 1944. It's her third World War II project, and it tells the tale of an ambassador whose indecisive links with his wife and mistress resemble the vacillation and pleasure of his professional life. She penned the screenplay for the film version, which came two years later. Both versions depicted the ambassador's feckless reaction to anti-Semitism. The play portrayed none of Hellman's pro-Soviet views, according to the conservative press, and the communist reaction to it was dismissive.

Both Hellman's applications for a passport to England in April 1943 and May 1944 were refused because government officials considered her a "conservative communist," although Ruth Shipley, the head of the Department of State's Passport Division, cited "the current military situation" as the reason. She received a passport in August 1944, indicating government approval for travel to Russia as a visitor of VOKS, the Soviet agency that handled cultural exchanges. She began an affair with John F. Melby, a foreign service officer, that lasted for years as an irregularity for the remainder of her life.

Hellman was accepted by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in May 1946. Another Part of the Forest premiered in November of this year, directed by Hellman. It was twenty years older than they had seen in The Little Foxes. Hellman did not participate in 1948 on a film version to which he did not participate.

Columbia Pictures gave Hellman a multi-year contract in 1947, which she refused because the deal contained a fidelity clause that she regarded as a violation of her right of free expression and association. It required her to sign a statement that she had never been a member of the Communist Party and would not associate with radicals or subversives, which would have required her to leave Hammett's life. William Wyler told her that she was unable to be hired to film because she had been blacklisted shortly after.

The heads of the motion picture industry in November 1947 decided to deny employment to anyone who refused to answer questions raised by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in November 1947. Hellman wrote an editorial in the December issue of Screen Writer, the publication of the Screen Writers Guild, following the Hollywood Ten's defiance of the committee. The committee was mocked by the committee and derided producers for allowing themselves to be intimidated by the word "The Judas Goats."

It said in part:

Melby and Hellman met regularly during World War II, although he held State Department positions abroad. Their political views diverged as he began to favor communism's containment although she was unwilling to hear criticism of the Soviet Union. "political strangers, occasional partners, and mainly friends," one historian said. Melby was particularly outraged by her opposition for Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election.

Montserrat, Emmanuel Roblès' French-language play, was staged in 1949 by the actress, who opened on October 29. Hellman directed it once more. In 1961, it was revived again.

The Autumn Garden, a play that has been praised by critics and voted by Hellman as her best, premiered in 1951.

Hellman was summoned in 1952 to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had heard that she had attended Communist Party meetings in 1937. She wrote a statement that said that her two-year membership in the Communist Party had ended in 1940, but she did not condemn the party nor express regret for her involvement in it. Joseph Rauh, her prosecutor, refused to accept membership on technical grounds because she had attended meetings but not officially become a party member. She warned that the committee and the public would expect her to take a strong anti-Communist stand to atone for her political experience, but she refused to apologize or condemn the group. Faced with Hellman's position, Rauh devised a tactic that gained positive press coverage and enabled her to avoid being branded a "Fifth Amendment Communist" in the media. Hellman wrote a letter to HUAC on May 19, 1952, one historian wrote it not to persuade the Committee but to influence press coverage." "I am able and willing to testify before the representatives of our government pertaining to my own conduct, regardless of any dangers or consequences to herself," she said in it. She wrote that she discovered that if she wanted to testify about others, she had to ask "difficult for a layman to understand." On Monday, Rauh had the letter sent by him to the HUAC's chairman, Rep. John S. Wood.

Hellman answered preliminary questions regarding her origins in a public testimony before HUAC on Tuesday, May 21, 1952. When asked about attending a particular gathering at Hollywood screenwriter Martin Berkeley's home, she refused to respond, claiming her rights under the Fifth Amendment, and she referred the committee to her letter by way of explanation. The committee responded that it had considered and denied her offer to testify only about herself and turned her letter into the record. Hellman answered only one more question: she denied ever belonging to the Communist Party. In response to several more questions, she cited the Fifth Amendment, but the committee dismissed her. Both Rauh's "clever tactics" and Hellman's "sense of the dramatic" were praised for what ensued after his testimony. Rauh was sent by the committee as she went on to other ventures, but she also sent HUAC's letter to HUAC. Committee members were only allowed to make offhand remarks because they were unprepared for close scrutiny of Hellman's position. Hellman's speech was lengthy, but its words were deliberately chosen to frame the HUAC members' remarks, according to the paper.

She wrote in part:

Reactions have been divided along political lines. Murray Kempton, a long-serving activist for communist causes, praised her: "It's enough that she has reached into her conscience for an act based on something more than the facts or the tactical... she has chosen to act like a lady." Her travel and her mail were monitored by the FBI, which led to an increase in her surveillance. The State Department investigated Melby's security in the early 1950s, at a time of anti-communist outrage in the United States. Based on evidence from unidentified informants, the department reported one formal charge against him from 1945 to date: "You have maintained an association with one, Lillian Hellman, who has openly stated to be a Communist Party employee." Melby did not have to contest Hellman's Communist Party membership or discover who notified her of her presence, but rather to present his political and physical relationship, including the occasional review of their physical relationship. He said he had no plans to revive their friendship, but that he had no promise to keep in touch with her.

Hellman testified before the Loyalty Security Board on his behalf during a string of appeals. She was willing to answer questions about her political convictions and memberships, but the board refused to discuss her friendship with Melby. She testified that she had long-standing friendships with people of varying political views, but that political sympathy was not a part of those friendships. "She portrayed how her friendship with Melby deteriorated with time and how their sexual relationship was briefly revived in 1950 after a long absence: it was neither over nor not over."

She said that:

Melby was dismissed by the State Department on April 22, 1953. The board gave no reason for its decision, as was normal in this situation.

Hellman turned down the opportunity to perform Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (1952) for the stage in 1954. The diary was "a superb historical work that will probably live forever," according to writer and director Garson Kanin, but the adapter couldn't be more wrong. If I did this, it would take one night because it would be so sad. To her colleagues, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, you need someone with a "light touch."

Hellman produced L'Alouette, based on Joan of Arc's trial, during Jean Anouilh's play L'Alouette. For the first performance, which opened on Broadway on November 17, 1955, Leonard Bernstein composed incidental music. Hellman edited a collection of Chekhov's correspondence that appeared in 1955 as The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov.

Hellman conceived of another play with incidental music based on Voltaire's Candide, following the success of The Lark. Bernstein persuaded her to make it as a comedic operetta with a much more significant musical component. She wrote the spoken dialogue, which many others later continued to work on, and she wrote some lyrics for Candide, the often revived, whose authorship. "I went to pieces when something had to be done quickly because someone didn't like something, and there was no time to figure it out." "Under circumstances I wasn't used to," I realised.

Toys in the Attic opened on Broadway on February 25, 1960, and the Attic has performed for 464 shows. Best Play was nominated for Best Play by the Tony Award for Best Play. In this family drama set in New Orleans, money, marital infidelity, and revenge culminates in a woman's disfigurement. Hellman had no involvement in the screenplay, which changed the drama's tone and exaggerated the characterizations, and the resulting film received poor feedback. Later this year, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Following Hammett's death in 1961, a second film version of The Children's Hour, which was less popular both in critics and box office, appeared in 1961 under the same name. In the 1961 version of The Children's Hour, the lead characters (played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) were explicitly accused of lesbianism, despite the continued existence of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Brandeis University awarded her its Creative Arts Medal for outstanding lifetime achievement and the women's section of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University also received its Achievement Award in 1961. Hellman was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in December 1962 and inducted in May 1963 at a ceremony in May 1963.

When it was performed in March 1963, My Mother, My Father, and Me was a failure. After 17 performances, it was sold out. How Much? by Hellman It was based on Burt Blechman's book How Much?

Hellman wrote another screenplay for The Chase in 1965, starring Marlon Brando and based on a Horton Foote play and novel. Although Hellman received sole credit for the film, she was involved in an earlier period, and producer Sam Spiegel made additional edits and altered the sequence of scenes. The Big Knockover, a collection of Hammett's tales, was edited by her in 1966. Hammett's first attempt at memoir writing was her first attempt at memoir writing.

Hellman reminiscence of gulag survivors Lev Kopelev, husband of her translator in Russia during 1944, to serve as the point of his anti-Stalinist memoirs, To Be Preserved Forever, which appeared in 1976. In February 1980, she, John Hersey, and Norman Mailer wrote to Soviet authorities to demand revenge against Kopelev for his defense of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Hellman, a long-time friend of author Dorothy Parker, served as her literary executor after her death in 1967.

Hellman's first volume of memoirs that reflected on her personal, artistic, and social life, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, which was awarded the National Book Award in category Arts and Letters from 1964 to 1976, was published in 1969.

Hellman wrote for short stretches at the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Hunter College in New York City in the early 1970s. Pentinto: A Book of Portraits, her second volume of memoirs, was released in 1973. Hellman described the challenge of writing about the 1950s in an interview at the time:

In 1976, Hellman published Scoundrel Time, her third volume of memoirs. These essays captured not only the exciting artistic period but also an influential tone, which was closely associated with the emergence of the feminist movement. "What Becomes a Legend Most" was a photo shoot in 1976 for the Blackglama national advertising campaign "What Becomes a Legend Most?" In August of that year, she was given the coveted Edward MacDowell Medal for her contribution to literature. Actors' Equity presented Paul Robeson Award in October.

Little Brown, Hellman's publisher, has canceled its deal to publish a collection of Diana Trilling's essays in 1976 after Trilling refused to delete four passages critical of him. When Trilling's collection appeared next year, the New York Times critic felt the need to posit his own motivation for the "simple confession of mistake" Hellman made in Scoundrel Time for her "acquiescence in Stalinism" to what he referred to as Trilling's excuses for her own behavior during McCarthyism. Arthur L. Herman, on the other hand, referred to Scoundrel Time as "breathtaking dishonesty."

At a dinner on March 28, 1977, Hellman received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film.

Greeted by a standing ovation, she said:

Julia, the 1977 Oscar winner, was based on Pentimento's "Julia" chapter. Hellman wrote about the screenplay to the film's director on June 30, 1976, just days before it was published.

Author Mary McCarthy, long Hellman's political foe and the object of her critical literary review, said of Hellman that "every word she writes is a lie," she wrote in a 1979 television interview. Hellman responded by launching a US$2,500,000 defamation lawsuit against McCarthy, interviewer Dick Cavett, and PBS. McCarthy, on her own, offered evidence that Hellman had lied in several aspects of her life. Cavett said he sympathized more with McCarthy than Hellman in the case, but "everybody lost" as a result of it. Norman Mailer tried to mediate the controversy through an open letter he published in the New York Times. Hellman was still in court with McCarthy at the time of her death; her executors dropped the case.

Maybe: A Novel, a 1980 Hellman book. Despite being fiction, Hellman, Hammett, and other real-life people appeared as characters. It attracted a mixed reception and was often read as another installment of Hellman's memoirs. Hellman's editor wrote to the New York Times to oppose a reviewer's attempt to verify the truth in the book. Characters misremember and dissemble in his book, according to him, it was a work of fiction in which characters misremember and dissemble.

Muriel Gardiner, a New York psychiatrist, said she was the source of Julia's title character and that she had never heard Hellman. The Hellman denied that the character was based on Gardiner. As Hellman compared Gardiner's account of her life and Gardiner's family was closely related to Hellman's solicitor, Wolf Schwabacher, some commentators believe that Hellman borrowed Gardiner's tale without acknowledging him.

Hellman died on June 30, 1984, age 79, on Martha's Vineyard, a 79 year old Hellman, died from a heart attack near her home on Martha's Vineyard, and is buried under a pine tree on a rise near Abels Hill/Chilmark Cemetery in Chilmark, Massachusetts. Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Source