John Van Druten

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John William Van Druten (1932), photograph by Carl Van Vechten

John William Van Druten (born June 1, 1901 in London , United Kingdom , † December 19, 1957 in Indio (California) , United States ) was an American writer and screenwriter of Dutch-British origin.

Life

Van Druten had a Dutch father and a British mother. In his hometown of London he attended University College School and then the University of London , where he took law courses. Van Druten then began to work as a lawyer and in 1925 presented his first play with Young Woodley . In a very short time he had established himself as a playwright. Van Druten's pieces Diversion, After All, London Wall, There's Always Juliet, Somebody Knows, Behold, We Live, The Distaff Side and Flowers of the Forest were shown with great success on London's West End stages between 1928 and 1934 .

With the beginning of the sound film era at the end of the 1920s, his works were first adapted for film, and so John Van Druten decided to move to the USA in the mid-1930s. There he began to write scripts himself from 1936. In 1939 he took part in one of the various script drafts for the classic film Gone with the Wind , without being mentioned in the opening credits . The following year, also unnamed, he was working on a theatrical version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice . For his work on the script for the thriller The House of Lady Alquist , he received an Oscar nomination in 1945 together with Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston . From the late 1940s, Van Druten only worked as a screenwriter for television productions. In 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

A number of Van Druten's stage designs were filmed with great success without the author being directly involved in the implementation of these materials, including "I Remember Mama" (German film title: Mystery of the Mother ), "Bell, Book and Candle" (German film title My bride is psychic ). Above all, however, "I am a Camera" from 1951 based on the autobiographical novels Mr. Norris rises to (1935) and Lebwohl, Berlin (1939) by Christopher Isherwood should be mentioned. After a little-noticed English film adaptation in 1955, the piece was then remade in Munich in 1971 under the title Cabaret as a musical version with enormous success.

Filmography

as a screenwriter

Web links

Commons : John Van Druten  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data by John Van Druten in: The Columbia encyclopedia of modern drama: MZ , by Gabrielle H. Cody, Evert Sprinchorn, Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 1417
  2. ↑ Members: John Van Druten. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 1, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Van Druten, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Van Druten, John William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Dutch-American playwright and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1957
Place of death Indio (California)