Lillian Hellman

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Lillian Hellman (1939)

Lillian Florence Hellman (born June 20, 1905 in New Orleans , † June 30, 1984 in Tisbury ( Martha's Vineyard ), Massachusetts ) was an American writer .

Live and act

Hellman came from a Jewish family. She was the only child of the shoe seller Max Hellman and his wife Julia (née Newhouse). She grew up in New York when she was five and studied at Columbia University . In 1925 she married the writer Arthur Kober; the marriage was divorced in 1932. After graduating, she published some minor papers in the Herald Tribune . Kober received a contract as a screenwriter with Paramount Pictures in Hollywood in 1930 . There she met the crime writer Dashiell Hammett in 1931 , who fascinated her. Lillian Hellman remained in a relationship with Hammett until his death in 1961.

She had her first success in 1934 with the play The Children's Hour , in which two young teachers are suspected of a lesbian connection and convicted of what destroys their professional plans and ends fatally for one of them, thus ending the other's marriage intentions. The play was performed on Broadway at the Maxine Elliot Theater and played en suite 691 times. In New York "you can see the daring and dramatic power of the piece". The play was filmed by William Wyler in 1936 , but the story was massively changed due to the rigid censorship regulations. For example, the controversial central theme was transformed into a heterosexual triangular story and the film was renamed These Three . Wyler filmed the play again in 1961 with well-known actors such as Audrey Hepburn , Shirley MacLaine and James Garner , although the topic remained provocative enough almost 30 years after the premiere of the play that it was not explicitly mentioned in this version either. Lesbian love is not the central theme of this piece, according to Renate Möhrmann . She argues that the author is more interested in what the student Mary Tilford, whose place in society thanks to her rich grandmother is "in the sunny side of the street", is able to do out of sheer lust for evil. Möhrmann underpins this by including the preceding motto, which contains the title of the piece, in her interpretation. It is by Henry W. Longfellow , "who goes back to romantic Victorian cultural ideals and sings the high song of childlike innocence". Rather, it is Hellman's concern: "the deconstruction of a collective cliché", also by equipping the pupil Mary with the features of Iago from Shakespeare's Othello . At the end of the second act, evil has triumphed and Mary slowly and calmly takes her seat again. Her lie has no consequences for Mary, the Machiavellian girl leaves the stage and the third act is an aftermath that runs without tension, says Möhrmann.

After the failure of her next play, Days To Come , Hellman went to Europe in 1936. As a correspondent, she reported on the Spanish Civil War , where she met Ernest Hemingway , whom she accompanied for some time. In 1939 she returned to the USA and in the same year had the greatest success of her career with The Little Foxes . The play about greed and the breakup of a family, with the prototypical figure of Regina Giddens as the woman who goes over corpses for success, stayed on Broadway for a year with Tallulah Bankhead . The play was filmed in 1942 with Bette Davis and directed by William Wyler.

Left-wing activist Hellman was targeted by John Stephens Wood's Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s . Because of her upright behavior during interrogations, she was also in later years a role model in the fight against the intolerance of the McCarthy era . In her later years, she toured the United States and spoke to students at universities, even when she was almost completely blind. In 1946 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1960 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works

Plays

  • 1934 The Children's Hour
    • Children's lesson , German by Bernd Samland
  • 1936 Days To Come
  • 1939 The Little Foxes
    • The little foxes , German by Bernd Samland
    • Yiddish from Moshe Altman
  • 1940 Watch on the Rhine , based on the film Watch on the Rhine
    • Before the decision
  • 1946 Another Part of the Forest
    • Another part of the forest , German by Bernd Samland
  • 1951 The Autumn Garden
    • Autumn garden , German by Bernd Samland
  • 1957 Candide (operetta libretto for Leonard Bernstein )
  • 1959 Toys in the Attic
    • Dollhouse , German by Bernd Samland

Autobiographical

  • 1969 To Unfinished Woman
    • An unfinished woman: A life between dramas , German by Kyra Stromberg, Frankfurt a. M .: Insel, 1970, ISBN 3-518-06792-3
  • 1973 Pentimento
    • Julia and other stories , German by Cordula Bickel, Munich: Goldmann, 1978, ISBN 3-442-03707-7
    • Pentimento: Memories , German by Eva Buchmann, Munich: Frauenbuchverlag, 1989, ISBN 3-88897-137-3
  • 1976 Scoundrel Time
    • The time of the villains , German by Peter Naujack, Frankfurt a. Main: New Critique Publishing House, 1979, ISBN 3-8015-0159-0

Filmography

script
Literary template

literature

  • Renate Möhrmann: Bad to the Bone. The Machiavellian girl in Lillian Hellman's play “The Children's Hour” and its film adaptations by William Wyler (USA 1936/1961) . In: rebellious - desperate - infamous. The bad girl as an aesthetic figure , edited by Renate Möhrmann, Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-875-3 , pp. 331–348.
  • Dorothy Gallagher: Lillian Hellman: an imperious life , New Haven [u. a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-16497-8 .
  • Victor Grossman : Rebel Girls: Portraits of 34 American Women , Cologne: Papyrossa, 2012, pp. 193–201.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Renate Möhrmann: Bad to the Bone. The Machiavellian girl in Lillian Hellman's play “The Children's Hour” and its film adaptations by William Wyler (USA 1936/1961) . In: rebellious - desperate - infamous. The bad girl as an aesthetic figure , edited by Renate Möhrmann, Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-875-3 , pp. 331–348.
  2. These persecutions - which also affected her companion Hammett and numerous friends or acquaintances - she describes in detail in The Time of the Villains .
  3. ^ Members: Lillian Hellman. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 3, 2019 .

Web links

Commons : Lillian Hellman  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files