Vera Caspary

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vera Louise Caspary (born November 13, 1899 in Chicago , United States , † June 13, 1987 in New York City ) was an American writer ( novels , plays , short stories ) and screenwriter .

Live and act

As a descendant of German-Russian-Jewish immigrants, Vera Caspary began her professional career at the end of the First World War as a stenographer . More junior office jobs followed before she began writing during the early 1920s. With her stories she supplied a wealth of (mostly New York) publications, including Finger Print Magazine and Dance Lovers Magazine. With Ladies and Gents , she wrote her first novel in 1927, but it was not published until 1929. By the end of the same decade, Caspary had established himself as a romancière and, in the early 1930s, also wrote stage plays, mostly in collaboration with a co-author. Strong women were often at the center of the action in their works, such as the less scrupulous title characters in Laura and Bedelia , their most famous works. In addition to her work as a writer, Vera Caspary remained loyal to the daily newspaper business and wrote articles for various publications.

At the same time, in the early 1930s, Hollywood began to take an interest in her writing talent and bought the filming rights for a number of her novels. From time to time Vera Caspary also contributed one or the other story idea, only once (1935) was she involved in a script in this decade. Towards the end of the 1930s, the writer began to be more and more interested in politics and quickly became enthusiastic about communism . Vera Caspary eventually became a member of the US Communist Party under the pseudonym Lucy Sheridan . In the spring of 1939 she paid a visit to the Soviet Union to compare claim with reality and visited both Leningrad and Moscow . Disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin Pact , Vera Caspary gradually withdrew from her ideal of a humane communism, even though she continued to advocate socialist ideals in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy and the Communist-controlled League of American Writers got involved and participated in crowdfunding for the politically persecuted.

At the same time, in 1941, Vera Caspary wrote her novel Laura . The exciting, dark crime story was published in 1943 and congenially filmed the following year by Otto Preminger under the same title. Laura was both an enormous critical and audience success and suddenly made Vera Caspary world famous. Nevertheless, not least because of its communist past and present, it got serious problems in the USA after the war, after Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “ witch hunt ” against every supposed or even real communist had spread across the USA. Caspary's latest work Bedelia (1945) was not filmed in Hollywood, but was made by her then partner and later husband (1948), the UK-based Austrian film distributor and film producer Isadore Goldsmith in London the following winter. Goldsmith then moved to the United States and realized two more Caspary works with his partner / wife in 1947 and 1950, Out of the Blue and Three Husbands . Also in 1950, she and her co-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz received the Writers Guild of America Award for their screenplay for A Letter to Three Women .

At the beginning of the 1950s, Vera Caspary's political past was also examined in Hollywood. After all, she did not get on the notorious "black list", which would have been equivalent to a work ban in the film business, but on its preliminary stage, a "gray list", which made her continued employment in the American film business much more difficult. Although the author was not completely boycotted and could continue to publish novels, Caspary's cinematic contributions were only reduced to story templates. She has not been employed as a screenwriter since 1951. In the last decades of her life, it became quiet around both her and her husband Goldsmith, who died in 1964. Most recently, the writer struggled with illnesses. She died of a stroke in 1987.

Catalog of works

Novels

  • A Manual of Classic Dancing , 1922
  • Ladies and Gents , 1929
  • The White Girl , 1929
  • Music in the Street , 1930
  • Thicker than Water , 1932
  • Laura , 1943
  • Bedelia , 1945
  • Stranger Than Truth , 1946
  • The Murder in the Stork Club , 1946
  • The Weeping And The Laughter , 1950
  • Thelma , 1952
  • False Face , 1954
  • The Husband , 1957
  • Evvie , 1960
  • Bachelor in Paradise , 1961
  • A Chosen Sparrow , 1964
  • The Man Who Loved His Wife , 1966
  • The Rosecrest Cell , 1967
  • Final Portrait , 1971
  • Ruth , 1972
  • Dreamers , 1975
  • Elizabeth X , 1978
  • The Secrets of Grown-Ups , 1979

Short stories

  • In Conference
  • Marriage '48
  • Odd Thursday
  • Out of the blue
  • Stranger in The House
  • Stranger than Truth
  • Suburbs

Stage plays

Script adaptations based on your book or theater piece templates (selection)

  • 1931: Working Girls (based on their play Blind Mice )
  • 1932: The Night of June 13 (based on her short story Suburbs )
  • 1934: Private Scandal (based on her short story In Conference )
  • 1934: Such Women Are Dangerous (based on her short story Odd Thursday )
  • 1937: My life in luxury (Easy Living) (story template only)
  • 1938: Scandal Street (based on her short story Suburbs )
  • 1938: Service de Luxe (story template only)
  • 1940: Sing, Dance, Plenty Hot (story template only)
  • 1943: Lady Bodyguard (story template only)
  • 1944: Laura (based on her novel of the same name; also TV adaptations in 1962 and 1968)
  • 1953: A Chance for Suzy (Give a Girl a Break) (story template only)
  • 1953: Gardenia - A woman wants to forget (The Blue Gardenia) (only story template)
  • 1957: The Girls (Les Girls) (story template only)
  • 1961: Bachelor in Paradise ( story template only)

Scripts

  • 1935: I'll Love You Always
  • 1941: Lady from Louisiana
  • 1946: Bedelia (based on her own novel)
  • 1946: Claudia and David (script adaptation)
  • 1947: Out of the Blue (based on her own short story)
  • 1948: A Letter to Three Wives (A Letter to Three Wives)
  • 1950: Three Husbands
  • 1951: I Can Get It for You Wholesale (script adaptation)

literature

  • International Motion Picture Almanac 1965, Quigley Publishing Company, New York 1964, p. 45
  • Ephraim Katz : The Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. Revised by Fred Klein and Ronald Dean Nolen. New York 2001, p. 232

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Caspary, Vera
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Caspary, Vera Louise (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer (novels, plays, short stories) and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , United States
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 1987
Place of death New York City