Frances Hackett

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Goodrich

Frances Goodrich (December 21, 1890 – January 29, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter, best known for her collaborations with her partner and husband Albert Hackett.

Early life

Goodrich was born in Belleville, New Jersey, the daughter of Madeleine Christy (née Lloyd) and Henry Wickes Goodrich. The family moved to nearby Nutley when Goodrich was two. She attended Collegiate School in Passaic, New Jersey, and graduated from Vassar College in 1912, and went on to the New York School of Social Work from 1912 to 1913.

Career

Not long after marrying screenwriter Albert Hackett, the couple went to Hollywood in the late 1920s to write the screenplay for their stage success Up Pops the Devil for Paramount Pictures. In 1933 they signed a contract with MGM and remained with them until 1939. Among their earliest assignments was writing the screenplay for The Thin Man (1934). They were encouraged by the director W. S. Van Dyke to use the writing of Dashiell Hammett as a basis only, and to concentrate on providing witty exchanges for the principal characters, Nick and Nora Charles (played by William Powell and Myrna Loy). The resulting film was one of the major hits of the year, and the script, considered to show a modern relationship in a realistic manner for the first time, was considered to be groundbreaking. However this is only because it was written and released before the enactment of the Hollywood Production Code, which strictly censored movies from mid-1934 until the early 1960s (see Pre-Code). The other Nick and Nora films show a steep decline regarding the "groundbreaking maturity" of the Charles' marriage.

They received Academy Award for Screenplay nominations for The Thin Man, After the Thin Man (1936), Father of the Bride (1950) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1955). They won Writers Guild of America awards for Easter Parade (1949), Father's Little Dividend (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), as well as nominations for In the Good Old Summertime (1949), Father of the Bride (1950) and The Long, Long Trailer (1954). They also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for their original play The Diary of Anne Frank. Some of their other films include: Another Thin Man (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Death

Frances Goodrich Hackett died from lung cancer, at the age of 93.

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Although the screenwriting team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett received critical and popular acclaim for the 1959 adaptation of their Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, The Diary of Anne Frank, most of their creative efforts were not "serious" works. Schooled in the sophisticated stage comedies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Goodrich and Hackett adapted The Thin Man in 1934, and it is a work now as then considered to be the best of the cinema's detective comedies. They followed this exceptional adaptation with an excellent After the Thin Man and an effective Another Thin Man, in both of which they succeeded in translating the work of Dashiell Hammett to the screen while managing to maintain the quality of his stories. They were equally adept at musicals. In the 1930s they adapted two vehicles for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Naughty Marietta and Rose Marie, reworking some of the stilted dialogue from the stage versions so that it was both more contemporary and more fluid. As well, the pair produced two splendid screen musicals—the flashy, colorful The Pirate in the late 1940s and the innovative Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the mid-1950s. Unusual in the couple's credits is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, a film that, in its warmth and humanity, seems more likely to have been the work of Robert Riskin, Capra's frequent collaborator, than that of the Hacketts. Critics now regard It's a Wonderful Life as an outstanding achievement—for its screenplay as well as for its execution. It was certainly a major film in Capra's career (coming ironically just when his fortunes were on the wane with the Hollywood establishment), and it is certainly the Hacketts's most significant contribution to film art. Wonderful Life, Anne Frank, the subtleties of The Thin Man, and the fresh handling of plot and character in the designed-for-the-screen musicals, The Pirate and Seven Brides, all serve to suggest that Goodrich and Hackett still remain the most eclectic screenwriters that Hollywood has produced. Their scope has not yet been matched by any other team

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