Beth Henley

Elizabeth "Beth" Becker Henley (born May 8, 1952 in Jackson , Mississippi ) is an American playwright who received the Pulitzer Prize for Theater in 1981 for her play Crimes of the Heart .

biography

The daughter of a lawyer and an actress studied after visiting the Murrah High School in Draper , the study Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from. After that she was from 1975 to 1976 teacher of drama at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In the 1970s she lived with the actor Stephen Tobolowsky .

In 1979 she made her drama debut with the play Crimes of the Heart , for which received the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Theater. This piece was entitled Crimes of the Heart filmed and was at the Academy Awards 1987 in the categories Actress ( Sissy Spacek ), supporting actress ( Tess Harper ) and they themselves in the category Adapted Screenplay nomination.

Her other stage works include The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979), Am I Blue (1982), The Wake of Jamey Foster (1983), The Debutante Ball (1985), The Lucky Spot (1986), Abundance (1991), Control Freaks (1992), Signature (1995), L-Play (1996), Impossible Marriage (1998), Family Week (2000) and most recently Ridiculous Fraud (2006).

In 1984 she made an appearance as an actress in the movie Swing Shift . She was also the author of screenplays such as for the film Miss Firecracker by Thomas Schlamme (1987).

Tom McCamus , who won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for his appearance in Abundance in 1994 , and Amy Ryan and Beatrice Kaps-Zurmahr in Crimes of the Heart are among the better-known actors in their plays .

Web links and sources

• Beth Henley in nndb (English)
• Beth Henley in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Biography (The Mississippi Writers Page)
• Biography (imagi-nation.com)