Sidney Howard | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Howard in 1909 | |
| Born | Sidney Coe Howard June 26, 1891 Oakland, California, U.S. |
| Died | (aged 48) Tyringham, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | Playwright,dramatist,screenwriter |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (BA) Harvard University |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1925) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Jennifer Howard |
| Relatives | Descendants of Robert Coe |
Sidney Coe Howard (June 26, 1891 – August 23, 1939) was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received thePulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumousAcademy Award in 1940 for the screenplay forGone with the Wind.
Sidney Howard was born in Oakland, California,[1] the son of Helen Louise (née Coe) and John Lawrence Howard.[2][3] He is a descendant ofRobert Coe, a 17th-century colonist whomigrated to America from England.[3] He graduated from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1915 and went on toHarvard University to study playwriting underGeorge Pierce Baker in his legendary "47 workshop." (Other alumni of Baker's class includedEugene O'Neill,Thomas Wolfe,Philip Barry andS.N. Behrman. Howard became good friends with Behrman.)
Along with other students of Harvard professorA. Piatt Andrew, Howard volunteered with Andrew'sAmerican Field Service, serving in France and the Balkans duringWorld War I. After the war, Howard made use of his proficiency at foreign languages and translated a number of literary works from French, Spanish, Hungarian, and German. A liberal intellectual whose politics became progressively more left-wing over the years, he also wrote articles about labor issues forThe New Republic and served as literary editor for the originalLife Magazine.[citation needed]
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In 1921, Howard's first play was produced on Broadway. A neo-romantic verse drama set in the time of Dante,Swords, did not do well with audiences or critics. It was with his realistic romanceThey Knew What They Wanted three years later that Howard established his reputation as a serious writer. The story of a middle-aged Italian vineyard owner who woos a young woman by mail with a false snapshot of himself, marries her, and then forgives her when she becomes pregnant by one of his farm hands, the play was praised for its un-melodramatic view of adultery and its tolerant approach to its characters. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it "a tender, original, merciful drama."[4]They Knew What They Wanted won the 1925Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was adapted three times into film (1928, 1930, and 1940) and later became the Broadway musical,The Most Happy Fella.
Howard's career was anything but consistent. For every successful play he wrote, he saw several others close without making any money. His saving grace was that he was a remarkably prolific writer.Lucky Sam McCarver, his next play, was an unsentimental account of the marriage of a New York speakeasy owner on his way up in the world with a self-destructive socialite on her way down. It failed to attract audiences, though it won the admiration of some reviewers.
With 1926'sThe Silver Cord, starringLaura Hope Crews,[5] Howard had a major hit. This drama about a mother who is pathologically close to her sons and works to undermine their romances, the result of a decade fascinated with Freud, Oedipal complexes, and family dysfunction. Both Howard's worksThe Silver Cord andNed McCobb's Daughter ran on alternate weeks in the 1926-1927 season, produced by theTheatre Guild.[6]The Silver Cord is also the only original play by Howard to outlive its era. (His 1929 adaptationS.S. Tenacity is periodically revived.) The play was occasionally staged by regional theater companies through the late twentieth century, and its first Off-Broadway production was mounted in 2013. The 1933 film of the play starredIrene Dunne andJoel McCrea, with Laura Hope Crews reprising her stage role.
By 1930, Howard was "one of the most dashing figures on the Broadway scene."[7] A prolific writer and a founding member of thePlaywrights' Company (withMaxwell Anderson,S. N. Behrman,Elmer Rice, andRobert Sherwood), he ultimately wrote or adapted more than seventy plays; a consummate theater professional, he also directed and produced a number of works.
In 1922, Howard married actressClare Eames (1896–1930), who had played the female lead inSwords.[8] She later starred in Howard'sLucky Sam McCarver (1925) andNed McCobb's Daughter (1926) on Broadway andThe Silver Cord in London (1927). The couple separated in 1927, and Howard's anger at the disintegration of his marriage is reflected in his bitter satire of modern matrimony,Half Gods (1929).
A particular admirer of the understated realism of French playwrightCharles Vildrac, Howard adapted two of his plays into English, under the titlesS. S. Tenacity (1929) andMichael Auclair (1932). One of his greatest successes on Broadway was an adaptation of a French comedy byRené Fauchois,The Late Christopher Bean.Yellow Jack, an historical drama about the war against yellow fever, was praised for its high-minded purpose and innovative staging when it premiered in 1934.
"In his thinking, Howard was very much a man of his time," Brooks Atkinson wrote. "He was a Wilsonian; he brooded on the tragedy of the League of Nations. He intended to write an ironic tragedy on the theme of the destruction of such a league that would be devoted to the service rather than the conquest of humanity, [using the techniques] that madeYellow Jack such a forceful drama."[9]
Hired bySamuel Goldwyn, Howard worked in Hollywood at MGM and wrote several successful screenplays. Despite his well-known left-wing political sympathies (he supported William Foster, the Communist Party candidate for president, in 1932), he became a shrewd Hollywood insider. In 1932, Howard was nominated for anAcademy Award for his adaptation of theSinclair Lewis novelArrowsmith and again in 1936 forDodsworth, which he had adapted for the stage in 1934.[10] He wrote a screenplay as well for Lewis's most political book, the anti-Fascist novelIt Can't Happen Here. The film was never made. (Studio officials claimed production-cost issues, but Howard maintained that the politics of the script were the issue.) Sinclair Lewis was a great admirer of Howard's stage work and was pleased with his three film adaptations, and the two men (whose political opinions aligned) became good friends.[11]
In 1935, Howard wrote the Broadway stage adaptation ofHumphrey Cobb's novelPaths of Glory. With its unsparing depictions of battlefield brutality, the play failed at the box office. As a World War I veteran, however, Howard believed it necessary to show the horrors of armed conflict. Convinced that the novel should be filmed one day, Howard wrote, "It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture."[12] Thefilm version of the novel, directed byStanley Kubrick, did not appear until 1957. Howard's screenplay forGone with the Wind echoedPaths of Glory with an unflinching look at the cost of war.[12]
After two Academy Award nominations and the Broadway success ofDodsworth, Sidney Howard was at the height of his fame in the late 1930s and appeared on the cover ofTime magazine on June 7, 1937.[13] Two years later, he was dead.
Howard was the posthumous winner of the 1939 Academy Award for an adapted screenplay forGone with the Wind. (He was the only writer honored for the writing of that screenplay, despite the fact that his script was revised by several other writers.) This was the first time a posthumous nominee for any Oscar won the award.[14]
Howard was also an advocate for writers' rights in the theatrical industry. In 1935, he served as the sixth president of theDramatists Guild of America.
Three years after their separation, Clare Eames died unexpectedly in 1930. She was the niece of opera singerEmma Eames on her father's side, and of the inventorHiram Percy Maxim on her mother's side, and a granddaughter of former Maryland governorWilliam Thomas Hamilton. Howard and Eames had one child, a daughter,Jennifer Howard (1925-1993), who became an actress.
The following year in 1931, Howard married Leopoldine "Polly" Damrosch, youngest daughter American of conductor and composerWalter Damrosch. The couple had a son, Walter Damrosch Howard, and two daughters, Lady Sidney Howard Urquhart, and Margaret Howard.[15]
His first daughter, Jennifer, marriedSamuel Goldwyn Jr. in 1950, with whom she had three sons: business executive Francis Goldwyn, actorTony Goldwyn, and studio executiveJohn Goldwyn.
Howard died in the summer of 1939 at the age of 48 in Tyringham, Massachusetts while working on his 700-acre farm. A lover of the quiet rural life, Howard spent as much time on his farm as possible when he was not in New York or Hollywood. He was crushed to death in a garage by his two-and-a-half ton tractor. He had turned the ignition switch on and was cranking the engine to start it when it lurched forward, pinning him against the wall of the garage. "His death was a Broadway calamity," Atkinson wrote. "Broadway and the Playwrights' Company lost one of its most admirable people...in the midst of an active career and full of ideas for more plays."[16] In his 2007 history of Broadway playwrights, Ethan Mordden wrote, "When he found his metier, Howard excelled at edgy American stories about charismatic but somewhat unlikable people. He seemed to enjoy testing his public; or perhaps he simply saw the world as being filled with rogues..."[17]
At the time of his death, Howard was working on a dramatization ofCarl van Doren's biography ofBenjamin Franklin.[9] He is buried in the Tyringham Cemetery.
Howard left behind a number of unproduced works.Lute Song, an adaptation of an old Chinese play co-written withWill Irwin, premiered on Broadway in 1946. A lighthearted reworking of theFaust legend,Madam, Will You Walk? closed out of town when produced by the Playwrights' Company in 1939, but was more warmly received as the first production of thePhoenix Theatre in 1953.
Shortly after his death his colleagues at the Playwrights' Company founded in his honor theSidney Howard Memorial Award. The award consisted of a prize of $1500 given to a young playwright without notable successes who had shown promise in a New York production.[18] The inaugural prize was given toRobert Ardrey in recognition of his playThunder Rock.[19]
Howard was posthumously inducted into theAmerican Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.[20]
