Jay Presson Allen

Jay Presson Allen, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, was born Jacqueline Presson in San Angelo, Texas on March 3, 1922. At the age of 18, she decided to become an actress in New York City. The charms of the profession soon paled and she married in the early 1940s, moving to southern California. Disenchanted with acting, she saw writing as a way of becoming financially independent and enabling to leave her unhappy marriage. Her first novel, Spring Riot, was published in 1948. She moved back to New York, where she performed in cabaret and on the radio, but she was as disenchanted with performing as she had been before. She eventually divorced her husband and in 1955, she married Lewis Allen, a reader at the office of Broadway producer Bob Whitehead. Allen initially rejected a play she had sent Whitehead that later was optioned but never produced. She eventually wrote another play, The First Wife, that was turned into the 1963 film Wives and Lovers. She optioned Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and wrote a dramatization, which was produced in London in 1966 and was a success, making the transfer to both Broadway and the silver screen. Maggie Smith won her first Oscar playing Jean Brodie. Allen had another success on Broadway with her play Forty Carats, which she adapted from a French comedy. The great Julie Harris won a Tony Award for her performance as a 42-year-old woman who seduces a man twenty years her junior. The same year that her next play, Travels With My Aunt, was released and failed, Allen was engage to adapt the Broadway hit Cabaret for fim director Bob Fosse. Under the direction of the producers, Allen went back to Christopher Isherwood's source material, the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the basis of his I Am a Camera, which itself was the genesis of Cabaret. Allen had to give structure to the story for the movie, but she clashed with Fosse, whom she found a depressive who drained the script of humor. She eventually quit, but she retained credit for the script, for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. Other projects that Presson worked on were Funny Lady, the 1974 sequel to Funny Girl, and the TV series Family. She adapted her 1969 novel Just Tell Me What Your Want for movie director Sidney Lumet, which was the first of four projects on which they collaborated. She was nominated for an Oscar for her adaptation of Robert Daley's novel Prince of the City, directed by Lumet. Her third collaboration with Lumet was an adaptation of Ira Levin's play Deathtrap. She also worked uncredited on Lumet’s The Verdict, rewriting David Mamet's script. She worked on the adaptations of A Little Family Business and La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway and on the TV series Hothouse. She wrote a biographical play about Truman Capote, Tru, which premiered on Broadway in 1991.